Labour party

The sense of unreality that hangs over party conference seems particularly heightened this year. As events outside roll on at a dramatic pace, the conferences try to proceed as normal. A new law on stalking may be necessary but it is small beer compared to the economic crisis gripping the Western world at the moment. Ed Miliband’s challenge in the next few days is two-fold. First, he has to work to restore Labour’s economic credibility—something that will be made even harder by today’s allegations about the role of his shadow Chancellor in the last government. Second, he has to show that the party gets the seriousness of this moment. Miliband, who travelled up on the train with his wife and children earlier today, is running into a headwind of bad polls.

Ed Miliband’s pre-conference interviews in Progress and the New Statesman serve as a reminder of the Labour leader’s desire to move the political centre ground. To the New Statesman he talks repeatedly of changing the current ‘settlement’ both economic and political. I presume by that he means the orthodoxies of the Thatcher-Blair era. Indeed, he tells Progress of one area where he wants to do things differently: ‘…people used to say “it is anti-aspiration to talk about people at the top”, it is not anti-aspiration – it is pro-aspiration.

Cameron and Miliband went six rounds on the economy at PMQs. Miliband tried to portray Cameron as just another Tory who thinks that "unemployment is a price worth paying". Cameron, for his part, wanted to paint the Labour leader as someone whose policies would send Britain tumbling into a sovereign debt crisis. At the end, it felt like a bit of a no-score draw. Interestingly, Cameron stressed that "every week and every month, we’ll be adding to that growth programme". We’ll have to see whether he’s talking about more small-bore measures, or something bigger on infrastructure investment. Labour had a new tactic today, trying to fact-check all of Cameron’s answers from last week.

David Cameron and IDS have been promoting the Work Programme this afternoon and they reiterated that jobseekers must learn English to claim benefits if their language difficulties are hampering their job applications. It’s another indication of the government’s radical approach to welfare reform. Aside from that, the main event in Westminster today was Ed Miliband’s speech to the TUC. Miliband was widely heckled by the Brothers, especially when he told them: “Let me just tell you about my experience of academies as I’ve got two academies in my own constituency. They have made a big difference to educational standards in my constituency and that is my local experience of that.

It’s the moment of the truth for Britain’s banking sector: the publication of the Vickers report. The headline is as expected: the Commission recommends the imposition of a ringfence on banks' ‘core operations’ (such as consumer deposits and small business lending) from the riskier elements of their business. According to the FT (£), the banks will have discretion over where the ringfence will fall, giving lenders and users a degree of flexibility, which suggests that Vickers is not recommending the full separation of retail and investment banking, as some had hoped.

How long will Alex Salmond's honeymoon with the voters of Scotland continue? Given that his next mission is to hold and win an independence referendum, much depends on his popularity and that of his party. Today, a third opinion poll puts support for the Scottish National Party at just under half of the national electorate. Angus Reid, polling for the Sunday Express, puts support for the SNP has now hit a remarkable 49 per cent. Given that the Nationalists only won 45 per cent of the votes in May's election – enough to sweep all the unionist parties into the background – this new high just shy of 50 per cent really does represent an extraordinary development in Scottish political terms. The poll also shows how far the Liberal Democrats have fallen.

The Vickers’ report into banks will land on the Prime Minister’s desk tomorrow. It goes to the banks very early on Monday morning before being published later that day. The thing to watch for is how politicians react to it. We know that the report will propose some kind of ring fence. But what we do not know is how strict the ring fence will be and how quickly Vickers will want it implemented. As Robert Peston says the impact of the ring fence on the banks’ creditworthiness will be felt long before the actual ring fence comes into effect. Intriguingly, Ed Miliband is giving a speech to the TUC that day. This gives him a platform to call for the immediate implementation of the whole report.

For those of you who missed the public outing of Peter Mandelson: The Real PM, the remarkably revealing, fly-on-the-turd psychomentary by the gloriously talented Hannah Rothschild, don’t despair, the boy will be back in town on DVD in full Slimeorama on 19th September. As I’ve already reviewed the show for this blog, the good and the great thought it would be a bit of a wheeze if I had a quick chat with Hannah over the phone. Now that was a shame, because lunch would have been much more fun, as Hannah was bubbly, mischievous and a Vesuvius of high grade gossip. She is so utterly disarming I can understand why Mandelson agreed to bare all (well, not all, thank God).