Labour party

Labour's lead in the polls has been pretty steady at around 10 points for a little over a year now. So why does today's Guardian carry an article with the headline 'Outright election victory in 2015 looks a distant prospect, pollster tells Labour'? It's based on two YouGov polls — commissioned by Progress and actually conducted two months ago, but released today. The first asked voters to put each of the parties into one of four categories: 'nice and smart', 'nice but dim', 'mean but smart' and 'mean and dim'. Labour seems to come out best, in that it has the highest proportion choosing 'nice and smart' and the lowest choosing 'mean and dim'. But only 24 per cent say the party is 'smart', compared to 33 per cent for the Tories.

I shall be on hiatus for the next week as I'm getting married on Saturday and I have an inkling that this is no time to be concerned that people are wrong on the internet. I leave you with my latest  Think Scotland column in which I consider some of the topics raised by Douglas Alexander in the Judith Hart Memorial Lecture he delivered last week. Douglas Alexander, probably the most thoughtful Scottish Labour MP (though I accept you may consider that only a minor accomplishment), delivered a typically interesting lecture last week. In it he suggested Scotland needs “a politics of opponents. Not enemies. We need a discourse of political difference, not a politics that descends into personal destruction.” Indeed.

The dust is settling from the County Council elections and, crucially, the Tory party seems to have stayed steady. Yes, David Davis has had a pop at the number of Old Etonians surrounding the PM and 20 MPs have called for a mandate referendum. But there is no sense of mass panic or revolt. Partly this is because David Cameron had already started doing the things he was going to be told to do after this result. As one Downing Street source remarks, ‘the shift is already well under way.’ He points to the tougher measures on immigration and welfare coming up in the Queen’s Speech and Number 10’s new efforts to involve Tory MPs in policy-making. Another thing steadying the Tory party’s nerves is that Labour did not do that well on Thursday.

335: total councillors lost by the Tories 291: seats gained by Labour 124: losses sustained by the Lib Dems 139: seats gained by UKIP 147 UKIP council seats after today's results 10 councils lost by the Tories 2 councils gained by Labour 13 councils now in overall control, up 8 17: the largest gain by UKIP in any council, in Kent 24: the most councillors gained by Labour in one local authority, in Durham 6,505: Emma Lewell-Buck's majority as the new Labour MP for South Shields, down from 11,109 achieved by David Miliband in 2010.

The result is now in from South Shields. As expected, Labour have held the seat. Ukip have come second, with the Tories third and the Liberal Democrats a spectacularly bad seventh. Ukip’s second is more impressive when you consider that they didn’t even stand in the constituency in 2010. It is a sign that they are fast becoming the default protest party across England. Only a handful of county councils are counting overnight, and they are all Tory controlled. But John Curtice, the elections expert, has already told the BBC that Ukip looks like doing as well as the polls suggested. At 12.15am, Ukip is averaging 26% in the BBC’s key wards.

It's not a case of will they, won't they when it comes to whether Labour would borrow more, but will they admit it and try to sell this plan to voters? In the past few days, we've seen the party trying to work this out in public. Ed Miliband, in his awkward World at One interview, knew that saying 'yes, we'd borrow more to fund the VAT cut' would provoke triumphant howls from his opponents, and so ended up nervously jabbering away as Martha Kearney asked the same question over and over again. But yesterday he told Daybreak that 'I am clear about this: a temporary cut in VAT, as we are proposing, would lead to a temporary rise in borrowing'. He added that 'I suppose I felt it was rather a commonplace' to make that clear the first time around.

The Labour Party is most exercised by the news, broken by the Spectator, that Economist journalist Christopher Lockwood has been appointed to the Downing Street Policy Unit. Poor old Lockwood is charged with being a bit posh, knowing David Cameron personally and attending a good school. This amounts to a crime against humanity in Labour land. Rent-a-quote Rachel Reeves, who moonlights as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, took time off her maternity leave to lambast the elitist chumocracy at the heart of Dave’s government. All of which is a bit rich because the Labour Party indulges this particular establishment vogue to a tee.

Whether you like Ed Miliband's latest party political broadcast depends very much on whether you're the sort of person who openly weeps while listening to Coldplay. It's got plenty of the Chris Martin playing Wembley factor: emotional piano music, people saying things like 'please, give people some hope', and the Labour leader leaning comfortingly against luggage racks, nodding knowingly. He talks about 'a country that comes together, a country that joins together, a country that works together', and even employs a 'yes, we can!' theme. But what do we learn about what Labour is going to do to address this hunger for hope?

There are few things more frustrating in politics than attempts to shut down a valid debate about a real social problem using the speaker's personal circumstances. Today's victim appears to be Richard Benyon, scalded for suggesting in a low-key Westminster Hall debate that Britain has a food problem. The environment minister told the debate on Wednesday that the government would set targets for helping families cut the amount of food they waste, saying: 'We all know that we ought to be wasting much less food, that food wasted means fewer pounds in our pocket, that the energy and water used to produce the food has been wasted, and that the transportation and packaging costs have been wasted.

Westminster has felt rather muted over the past few weeks: it may well continue to do so today, but for good reasons. That the first estimate of Q1 GDP figures recorded growth of 0.3 per cent means Labour spinners have to work much harder on falls in certain sectors in order to get their points across, and that George Osborne and David Cameron can relax, knowing they've just been gifted more good feeling in their party until at least the local elections. After the building tension over today's figures came a really rather good anti-climax. This means that the spotlight remains on Labour, and not the Conservative party. Len McCluskey's intervention yesterday - slapped down by Ed Miliband as 'reprehensible' - is just one of a number of cracks appearing in the party's unity.

The political mood has shifted these past few weeks. There’s now, as the Sunday papers demonstrate, far more focus on Labour than there was a couple of months back, something which pleases Number 10 which is confident that Labour is ill-equipped to deal with much scrutiny. Ed Miliband is coming under pressure to be far more specific about what he would do in government. Much of this is being driven by the coalition’s spending review for 2015/16, the results of which will be announced on June 26th. If Labour wins the next election, it’ll be in office when these cuts are being implemented. This leads to the question of whether or not Labour will accept these spending plans.

Ed Miliband’s speech to the Scottish Labour conference is another illustration that he intends to depict ‘One Nation Labour’ as the answer to so-called Tory divisiveness. Miliband told the conference: ‘As leader of the Labour Party [I] will never seek to divide our country and say to young person in Inverness or the older worker laid off in Ipswich desperately looking for work, that they are scroungers, skivers or somehow cheating the system.’ But in the context of today’s Independent story about Labour planning to go into the next election committed to higher spending than the Tories, a story which Ed Balls crossly contested on the radio this morning, what struck me about the speech was the way Miliband talked about Labour’s policies.

One interesting decision that Ed Miliband made this week was to appoint Karen Buck as his PPS, following the long-planned departure of John Denham. Tory MPs have told me they were very quickly given 'lines to take' on how this represented a big 'lurch to the left' on the Labour leader's part. CCHQ is right that Karen Buck is on the left of her party: as a shadow welfare minister she pushed for the party to oppose the £26,000 benefit cap when Liam Byrne's official line was to leave it be (one he later reversed). But the line to take conveniently forgets that one of the principal purposes of a PPS is to act as a conduit between a leader or minister and the opposite side of the party. So a minister on the right of their party should in theory appoint a PPS on the left.