Labour party

A few weeks ago, a shadow minister urging Labour to avoid ‘shallow and temporary’ populism over spending cuts might have seemed like a sally against the party's Ballsist wing. But given that Ed Balls has since said that ‘Labour will give more details of its tough spending decisions [in 2012]’, then Jim Murphy's intervention in the Guardian today is a little less provacative than that. In truth, the shadow defence secretary's words fit perfectly into Labour's plan to sound more fiscally responsible this year. It is, most likely, party policy dressed up as a clarion call. What's striking is that Murphy goes beyond this simple rhetoric, becoming the first shadow minister to give some of those ‘details’ that Balls mentioned.

Before Christmas, The Times's Sam Coates managed to get his hands on Labour's ‘media grid’ for the week — and much Westminster-y fun it was too. But now he's gone one better, by publishing a strategy memo that Ed Miliband's director of communications, Tom Baldwin, has produced for his Labour colleagues. It's well worth reading in full, here and here, not least because it outlines the party's argument for the coming year. In summary, though, it's much like Miliband's New Year's address: more of the same, with a side order of fiscal responsibility.

Maurice Glasman’s New Statesman piece on Ed Miliband is causing a bit of a stir. Lord Glasman, an academic who Miliband proposed for a peerage, writes that the Labour leader ‘has not broken through. He has flickered rather than shone, nudged not led.’ But if you read between the lines of Glasman’s article it is clear that he thinks someone is holding Miliband back and he drops very heavy hints as to who that is. For instance, the second sentence reads as follows: ‘Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem stuck in defending Labour's record in all the wrong ways - we didn't spend too much money, we'll cut less fast and less far, but we can't tell you how.

Whenever politicians talk about social care, they tend to promise ‘cross-party talks’. It's their little euphemism for ‘we don't want to commit to a policy by ourselves.’ Don't get them wrong, it's not that they don't have ideas for fixing a system that is straining under the weight of an ageing population; the Dilnot report, released earlier this year, gave them plenty of recommendations to work with. It's just that they don't want to be the ones to implement the tax hikes or spending cuts that will be necessary to fund it. If they can talk it through with the other parties — the thinking goes — then this crucial policy area can be detoxified, the blame spread more or less evenly.

Well, folks, the 2012 model of Ed Miliband looks and sounds rather like the unfancied 2011 model. Just compare the New Year message that he released today with the one that he issued a year ago; the similarities are plenty. His main argument this year is that the Tories are the party of gloom — resigned to years of stagnancy, unemployment, pestilence, etc — whereas Labour are the party of a bright new future, there to show that ‘optimism can defeat despair’. Or, as he put it at the end of last year, ‘Even in these tough times, we must keep the flame of optimism burning.’ There are some differences, though. Compared with last year, Miliband talks much less about the coalition going ‘too far, too fast’ with deficit reduction.

It was not so long ago — the run-up to last May's AV referendum, to be exact — that we heard the coalition would be entering a new phase. Gone was the happy synthesis of the Tories and Lib Dems that prevailed after the election, and in its place would be a government that spoke more openly, more angrily about its differences. But even if Phase 2.0 had the appearance of being more fractious, it was actually designed to keep the parties together. The idea was that, by highlighting the essential differences between the two sides, their supporters could more easily be kept on board with the overall project. I mention this, this morning, because it looks as though that strategy is either being ramped-up or taken in a new direction. During Phase 2.

With one well-timed jab in PMQs, David Cameron turned much of this week's political debate – in domestic terms, at least – into a debate about Ed Miliband's leadership. And how is Miliband responding? Predictably, for the most part. His celebratory speech in Feltham and Heston this morning reduced down to the claim that the result 'offers a verdict on the Government's failed economic plan'. And his interview in today's FT covers much of the same territory. But the FT interview is also revealing in one particular regard: it demonstrates, once again, how Miliband is caught in a strange, undefinable strategy somewhere between attack and defence. This was, if you remember, a feature of his first speech as Labour leader – and here it crops up again.

There has, as we all know, always been a fug of doubt about Ed Miliband's leadership. Even when Labour have been winning by-elections (as they're expected to in Feltham and Heston tomorrow), even when even when they have fluttered ten points above the Tories, the question has always been there: would they be better off without him? After all, in terms of poll numbers, the party has generally exceeded the man. But today that question is wrapped in flashing, coloured lights, with a star on top. It's not just how David Cameron filleted Miliband in PMQs earlier, but more Labour's position in the latest opinion polls. As others have pointed out, every pollster now has the Tories basically level with Labour, or ahead of them.