Labour party

The Department of Education is remarkably unbothered by yesterday’s Guardian splash about free schools. Why? Because they have known for months that the emails on which it was based had gone missing. Indeed, the only thing that surprised them about the story was that it did not appear three months ago in the Financial Times. Email security in Whitehall is notoriously bad. Ministers and special advisers often don’t realise that civil servants have access to their email accounts. This access provides ample opportunity for those hostile to the government’s political agenda to leak out stories. (Most ministers in both this and the last government use secret squirrel email addresses to

Party politics is back from the summer and the summer’s events are defining the strategic dividing lines. Ed Miliband reopened hostilities by threatening to force a vote on police cuts. The Standard reports: ‘The Labour leader said ministers were being “reckless” in refusing to rethink planned 20 per cent savings following the worst rioting in living memory. Launching a new campaign during a visit to Lewisham, Mr Miliband claimed the cuts, reducing officer numbers by 16,000, would “weaken the forces of law and order on our streets”.’ Policing Minister Nick Herbert, one of the coalition’s stars outside the cabinet, described Miliband’s claims as ‘hypocrisy’, pointing out that Labour did not

“More than 400,000 people have been out of work for more than two years, according to analysis of the latest Government data by think tank IPPR.” So runs its press release today, trailed in the Sunday press and the wires. I hope the IPPR didn’t spend too much of their donors’ money on this research, as the figure is updated quarterly and freely available from the DWP website (click here). Add up only three categories: lone parents, jobseekers allowance and incapacity benefit the figure stands at 2.4 million, certainly “more than 400,000”. Worse, at the peak of the boom (Feb07), this figure was even higher at 2.5 million. And yes, it’s

There are few more useful addendums to Danny Alexander’s comments earlier than YouGov’s poll for the Sunday Times today. It asks people about individual policies for growth, and the results will be disheartening for the Tory leadership and encouraging for Ed Balls. An overwhelming majority supports Balls’s call for a cut in VAT, while few back a reduction in the 50p rate: There’s an almost identical picture when it comes to which polices people think would support growth: Perhaps most tellingly, even Tory supporters are against cutting the 50p rate: And, again, a similar picture emerges with respect to growth: Of course, none of this means that Labour has won

As Paul Waugh notes, James Purnell’s article for the Times today (£) is striking for its attack on universal benefits. “I have never bought the argument,” writes the former welfare secretary, “that universal benefits bind the middle classes in. It feels too much like taxing with one hand to give back with another.” Although this is, in truth, a point that he has been making for some time. He said something similar in a speech back in April. The question, really, is how much Purnell’s viewpoint will percolate down through Labour circles. During last year’s leadership election, it seemed as though universal benefits were to become one of the defining

Just when everyone is all afroth about the murky connections between the political class and the media, a letter by Andrew Lansley to Danny Alexander has mysteriously leaked to the Telegraph. It was sent two months ago, and it concerns the government’s public sector pension proposals. For five pages, Lansley riffs on about why the reforms may not be such a good idea, particularly when it comes to NHS workers. “We face a real risk, if we push too hard,” he says, “of industrial action involving staff groups delivering key public services.” He suggests that lower and higher paid staff may just opt-out of the pensions scheme altogether, leaving the