Labour party

The coalition wants this week to be all about the GDP figures, out on Friday. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, Downing Street is confident that they’ll show the economy is continuing to grow at a relatively decent clip and is already working out how to make political out of that. They have, as Simon Walters reports, already prepared a video mocking Labour’s claims that the coalition’s polices would lead to a million more people on the dole. Ed Miliband’s circle expects that the GDP numbers will again be positive. But they take the view that as long as prices are increasing faster than wages, squeezing voters’ living standards, economic growth won’t mean much politically.

First Ed Miliband was papped with a teenager holding a ‘bong’ (above). Now the Labour leader is being offered dope on the street by passing fans. According to the Ham & High, little Ed and his team believed that builder Robert Quinn had offered them his ‘last Rolo’ on a walkabout in Camden. In fact, Quinn had offered his ‘last rollie’, referring to a joint. And there was Mr Steerpike thinking that they must be smoking something already.

Len McCluskey is doing Conservative HQ’s work for them. The emboldened Unite leader is welcoming the return of socialism under Red Ed. Last night at the annual Jimmy Reid lecture, McCluskey spoke passionately of Miliband’s bold new agenda: ‘Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour conference was – some would say – the most genuinely radical we have heard from a Labour leader for nigh on 30 years.' He also welcomed the end of New Labour's ‘neo-liberal’ dogma (you know, the policies which resulted in three general election victories). In reference to Ed’s energy policy: ‘that is not just a break with the coalition’s policies, it also represents Labour turning its back on the neo-liberal dogmas which dominated the Blair-Brown years.

The OECD released a report this week on education standards. It makes for grim reading: we’re bottom of the class. Those aged 16-24 in England came 22nd of 24 for literacy, and 21st for numeracy. We’re behind almost every other advanced nation in the world. What’s gone wrong? There’s a clue in the different scores by age. Young people who had pretty much their entire education under the last Labour government do worse than most older generations. The clear problem – is a decade of dumbing down led by Labour and supported wholeheartedly by the teaching unions. They made qualifications in cake decorating 'equivalent' to physics GCSE. They allowed calculators in primary maths tests.

The details of the government reshuffle are currently being hammered out at the 8.30 Downing Street meeting. But as MPs and ministers nervously wait for the call from the Number 10 switchboard, Ed Miliband will be plotting his own changes to his top team for later this week. And as key Shadow Cabinet members such as Liam Byrne look vulnerable, one shadow minister who is holding on with all he's got is Andy Burnham. The Shadow Health Secretary is very popular with the party's grassroots, but he is also politically vulnerable because of his connections to the previous Labour government. But though Ed Miliband failed to publicly back Burnham at the party's conference, his colleague has in the past few days launched an offensive on his detractors that also makes it more difficult to move him.

If this conference season is remembered for anything, it will be for Ed Miliband’s pledge to freeze energy prices. This pledge might be economically flawed but it has given the Labour leader a retail offer to voters and rebutted the charge that he doesn’t have any policies. Initially, the Tories were uncertain of how to respond. But, as I write in the Mail on Sunday, the Tory leadership has now decided what it wants to do. In George Osborne’s autumn statement, they want to remove some of the seven green taxes and levies that are driving up energy bills. Not only would this reduce the salience of Miliband’s pledge but it would also put him in a difficult position. As Energy Secretary he imposed several of these.

When David Cameron first addressed Parliament on the Francis Report, he told MPs that he didn't want to seek scapegoats. Some of his MPs were disappointed that the Tory leadership wasn't going after Andy Burnham or Sir David Nicholson. Well, the latter has left, and the former is looking vulnerable in a forthcoming Labour reshuffle, and for months the gloves have been off. After gaining access to a dossier of emails suggesting that Labour tried to stop the Care Quality Commission informing the public about failings at Basildon Hospital, Tory MP Stephen Barclay, who has been digging away on this for months, has called for Burnham to resign. He said: ‘Labour tried to cover up failing hospitals before the last General Election.

Such is my respect for Spectator readers that I offer you a column whose subtext is in Latin. Ours is one of the last mainstream magazines among whose readership the phrase mutatis mutandis will be very widely understood. But the little test you and I are going to try concerns a live issue, not a dead language. For the purposes of this test I am going to paint you a scenario, and you’re going to give me the broad thrust of the advice you’d give in such circumstances. Imagine that the Labour party has been trying for some time to position itself firmly on the centre ground.