Labour party

The row over G4S' failure to provide sufficient security cover for the Olympics is starting to feel a little awkward for Labour. This afternoon in the Commons, Yvette Cooper managed to rouse a sardonic chuckle from not just the benches opposite but also the hacks perched in the press gallery when she said that everyone wanted the Olympics to be a success. Why the laughs? Well, the danger for Labour is that in slamming the government's handling of G4S, the party gets too carried away and appears to be branding the Olympics a shambles too.

Perhaps what most depressed the Liberal Democrats this week was the sense that the two main parties were rejecting the idea of coalition. One described to me how depressing he found it during the Lords reform debate to watch the Labour front bench revelling in every Tory intervention on Nick Clegg. At the top of the Lib Dems, there’s now a real worry that both Labour and the Tories would try and govern as a minority government after the next election if there’s another hung parliament rather than form a coalition. This would lock the Liberal Democrats out of power.  All of this makes Andrew Adonis’ comments in The Times today particularly striking.

When Ed Miliband gave his speech to Labour's autumn conference last year, he rather tied himself in knots about how to end predatory capitalism. The Labour leader was trying to make it clear that he would stand up to vested interests, but the message was lost under a row about whether he was pro- or anti-business. Today Miliband managed to put that speech into context a little more, by announcing Labour's plans to change the culture of banking in this country. Instead of predator banks, he wants 'stewardship banking', which builds 'a long-term, trusted relationship with their customer' and serves the real economy as well as the industry itself.

The momentum for a public inquiry into banking is growing. The Daily Mail front page demands ‘Put Bankers In the Dock’. While Ed Miliband has given an interview (£) to The Times in which he calls for an inquiry into the ‘institutional corruption in the City’. Miliband thinks that this inquiry should be tasked with drawing up a code of conduct for investment bankers equivalent to the one governing solicitors. Bankers who breached this code would be struck off.   Now, many will say that Labour have a cheek lecturing on banking regulation given the total failure of the new system they introduced.

Tony Blair has chosen this summer to launch his re-entry mission into British politics. He hired a UK communications director in May, guest-edited the Evening Standard yesterday and agreed to a rather intriguing interview in same paper, stating he would like to return to office, while accepting it was not likely. So what is the aim of Mr Blair's new campaign? Blair had little choice than to take a back seat during the Brown premiership. But the dismal failure of his successor, followed by Miliband's growing authority and strong Labour polling, makes now the perfect time for the former prime minister to start rehabilitating his image. Until now, he has yet to take up a peerage, as many former Prime Ministers have done.

Ed Miliband was spoilt for choice at today’s PMQs. Scarcely a week goes by without the government reneging on some budget promise, so Labour’s  leader had a whole fistful of blunders to consider. Wisely, he took the simplest option and quoted an apologia made by David Cameron on April 11th. ‘I will defend every part of the budget,’ the prime minister told some interviewer somewhere. ‘I worked on it very closely with the Chancellor. Line by line.’ That was pure gold for Miliband. And pure poison for the prime minister. ‘What went wrong?’ asked the Labour leader casually.   Cameron flipped into full denial mode. ‘I cannot be a U-turn!’ he shouted fierily.

Labour's Opposition day debate tomorrow on Gove-levels might not reveal as much as the party hopes about where Liberal Democrat MPs stand on the Education Secretary's planned reforms. True, you won't see a Lib Dem lift so much as a finger in outright support of what Nick Clegg dubbed 'a two-tier system' created by scrapping GCSEs and replacing them with two sets of exams, but this might not be the forum for them to launch a rebellion. One key figure on the left of the party points out that 'it's not where the decision will be made', while another MP says Labour's motions are often so 'over-the-top' that they are unsupportable.

Here we go again. Ed Miliband gave another speech about immigration this morning proving yet again that this is a subject about which no-one is ever permitted to talk. Any time a Labour politicians talks about immigration and the party's record in government I am reminded of Evelyn Waugh's acid observation on hearing the news that Randolph Churchill had successfully endured an operation to remove a benign tumour. This, Waugh wrote in his diary, represented  "A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it." Comparably, it seems a typical triumph of modern politics that Labour should disown one of the more reputable parts of its record in office.

Labour has only ever won a general election from the autumn of 1974 onwards when its leader has been called &"Tony Blair”. Four other leaders tried, but they were not called &"Tony Blair,” and Labour paid the price. I find it hard to credit the left’s failure myself sometimes, and, equally, find it easy to understand how Labour supporters became riddled with self-hatred and self-doubt as they saw ‘their’ Blairite government in action. But it is going a bit far for Paul Kenny of the GMB to deal with the compromises of the past by calling on Labour to declare the Blairte think tank Progress an anti-party organisation and ban it     I won’t detain you for long with the obvious objections.

The attack on Progress by the GMB union at its annual conference is odd and reflects the uncertainty of trade unions as they try and work out their role and status in a 21st century which is proving very unfriendly to trade unions across the world. In the United States, only 7 per cent of the private sector workforce is unionized. The figures in France are similarly low. In Britain, TUC membership has shrunk for the fourth year in succession.   Union bashers may rejoice, and certainly there are Tory MPs who think the last great bit of Thatcherite unfinished business is the extirpation of organized labour.

Ed Miliband's speech last week, in which he grappled with questions of Britishness, identity and Unionism, was a worthy effort. By which you will grasp that it was also, in the end, not quite good enough. The Labour leader spoke as though he had only recently appreciated — or had brought to his attention — that national identity on these islands is often a matter of choice and that — insert obligatory Whitman reference here, please — many people have multiple, layered identities that may, at times, even seem to contradict one another. Gosh, you think?   And, alas, he foundered in the Q&A when he told one inquisitor: ‘People can be Scottish and British, it's OK. And if they feel primarily Scottish that's fine too.