Labour party

Friday

David Blackburn

From the archives – striking matters

From our UK edition

This week, there have been calls for certain public sector strikes to be made unlawful, Tube strikes and, today, the firemen have called off their strike having ‘listened to the concerns of the public’. It is all so 2002. Go To Blazes, The Spectator, 26 October 2002 Any public sector union contemplating a strike is best advised to start by targeting children’s bookshops. It is remarkable how groups of workers who first impinge on the consciousness through the pages of nursery books manage to command greater public affection and higher wage settlements than those who do not. Nurses and train-drivers have done particularly well out of recent pay disputes.

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

Alan Johnson: this time it’s personal

From our UK edition

Alan Johnson has been more comic than cutting during his spell as shadow chancellor. It's not so much that he's doing a bad job, but rather that he's taken a singular approach to the biggest political issue of the day. Where Labour MPs have wanted moral outrage, he has delivered easy quips. Where the public might expect self-confidence, he has chosen self-deprecation. It may be charming, but the question is: does it win votes? Which is why it's intriguing to see Johnson change course today, via a surprisingly spiky article in the New Statesman. There is, so far as I can tell, not one intentional gag in the entire piece – but a sizeable dollop of coalition baiting. Johnson calls for a new mantra from his party: "Labour's record was good".

Peter Hoskin

Cameron’s bad news day

From our UK edition

Yesterday, Nick Robinson set out why the past week may count as David Cameron's worst in office so far. It's not a great news day for the Prime Minister today, either. First up is a new report from the Commons public accounts committee. Its headline finding relates to the last government, but has stark implications for this one: only £15 billion of the £35 billion of savings identified in the 2007 Spending Review have been implemented, and only 38 percent of those have come from "definitely legitimate value-for-money savings". In other words, all those efficiency savings may not be as straightforward as you were led to believe - even if there are efficiencies to be made. Osborne & Co.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Obama vs Labour

From our UK edition

Compare and contrast and be reminded, yet again, that the United Kingdom and the United States play by different rules. During his press conference this afternoon - on which more later - Barack Obama took great care to reiterate his opposition to tax increases for "middle-class" Americans (ie, those earning under $200,000 a year). Increasing taxes, he said, would "take money out of the system". In Britain, however, the Labour party has spent the last year telling everyone that cutting spending means the government is "taking money out of the system" -  a proposition that invites one to wonder if Labour believes that raising taxes would be "putting money into the economy." You can certainly argue that both positions are reasonable, even correct.

Peter Hoskin

Why Ed Miliband was being deceptive over debt

From our UK edition

"Remember, our government paid down the debt before the crisis hit." That's what Ed Miliband said in a speech last Friday, and I took exception to it at the time. My point was, admittedly, quite blunt: how could the Labour leader make such a claim when debt was around £500 billion in 2006, and rising? So I'm glad that the excellent Full Fact blog has since looked into the matter, and come down broadly on my side – giving Miliband a 2-out-of-5 rating on their truth scale. But some of their wider points are worth developing, which is why I'm returning to the topic now. First, though, the observation that I made on Friday. Here's a graph which shows our national debt throughout the Labour years.

Lloyd Evans

Music hall act fails to cut it next to suave Etonian

From our UK edition

Miliband’s in a mess. He makes it far too easy for Cameron to portray him as a hypocritical opportunist who sidles up to PMQs every week with lame soundbites and incoherent policies. How come? Perhaps because he sidles up to PMQs every week with lame soundbites and incoherent policies. Today he tried to unsettle the PM with the news that ‘members of his government’ (ie LibDems) ‘have given cast-iron guarantees that they would vote against a rise in tuition fees.’ This isn’t a Cameron problem. It’s a Clegg problem. Right issue, wrong tactics. Cameron had no difficulty adopting a noble but weary expression and praising his coalition partners for taking ‘courageous decisions’ in ‘difficult’ circumstances.

James Forsyth

Hardly vintage stuff from Ed and Dave

From our UK edition

Neither Ed Miliband nor David Cameron had a good PMQs. Cameron let his irritation at questions about the appointment of his campaign photographer to a civil service post show. It was also a bit rich for him to criticise a Labour MP for asking a question scripted by the whips when Tory MPs ask patsy questions with monotonous regularity, I counted at least four in this session alone. But the regular shouts of ‘cheese, cheese’ from the Labour benches were clearly riling the Prime Minister. But it wasn’t a good session for Ed Miliband either. His delivery was rather halting and he stumbled on his words far more than he usually does. His jokes didn’t quite come off either.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 3 November 2010

From our UK edition

VERDICT: Perhaps the snappiest exchange between Cameron and Miliband so far, with both men on combative form. Miliband's charge was that, from tuition fees to child benefit, the coalition is breaking promises that it made before the election. And Cameron's counter was that he has had to take tough action to deal with the mess that Labour left behind, and that Ed Miliband has nothing to offer to that process other than kneejerk opposition. As exchanges across the dispatch box go, that's pretty standard stuff – but at least it was packaged with some wit (although little real insight) today. A score draw. 1232: And that's it. My short verdict coming up.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Why is Hopi Sen a Free Man?

From our UK edition

By which I mean why isn't he cooped up inside Ed Miliband's office, working as a strategy-comms chap? Maybe he wouldn't want the gig but it's a good thing for us (in both a blogging and an anti-Labour sense) that he's still a free man. Take this latest bout of good sense, for instance: Our nation has significant challenges – from deficit reduction to welfare policy to job growth. As an opposition we must have opinions on all of these, but lack the power to act on them. That is an exposed, vulnerable position. We already know how the Tories want to define us.  They want to spend the next four years painting us as wasteful in the public services, over-generous with welfare at the price of higher taxes for working families.

Monday

James Forsyth

Cameron emerges unscathed

From our UK edition

David Cameron’s statement on the European summit just now was an opportunity for pro-European politicians to tweak the Conservative party’s tail about the coalition’s stance on Europe. Ed Miliband told the PM that on Europe ‘we’re here to help him’ and ‘we’re prepared to ignore his previous convictions if he is too.’ Charles Kennedy welcomed the PM as a new pro-European. While Denis MacShane, the very communitaire former Europe Minister, said that there was nothing in Cameron’s statement he disagreed with. There was some grumbling from the Tory benches. Sir Peter Tapsell asked why if Merkel can get a Treaty amended can’t Cameron do the same and allow the country the referendum it was promised.

David Blackburn

All is not quiet of the welfare front

From our UK edition

Welfare is fast becoming this parliament’s Ypres Salient - strategically critical, it is constantly contested. £20bn on social housing, £100bn on out of work benefits and £billions on universal benefits: welfare reform is where spending cuts are most conspicuous. A rhetorical confrontation is building and various tactical dispositions are being made. The Staggers’ George Eaton has an analysis that assumes that Labour’s current wedge-strategy (which I critiqued here) is not working because it is avowedly sectional, privileging those who might be caricatured as ‘undeserving’. Eaton argues that Labour must ‘launch a defence of the hard pressed majority’; those who work but still stand to lose, particularly families.

Alex Massie

Labour’s Housing Benefit U-Turn

From our UK edition

Hats off to Tom Harris for pointing out the obvious: comparing the coalition's canges to housing benefit to Balkan ethnic cleansing or Auschwitz is neither big nor clever. Points too for reminding us that the Labour manifesto this year included this passage: Our goal is to make responsibility the cornerstone of our welfare state. Housing Benefit will be reformed to ensure that we do not subsidise people to live in the private sector on rents that other ordinary working families could not afford. How many "ordinary working families" (however they may be categorised) can afford to pay £25,000 in rent each year? Precious few, I submit.

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Return of the Gord

From our UK edition

Oh look, the Old Crowd are moving in on the New Generation's patch. Not only has David Miliband broken his post-defeat silence with an engaging little article in the Mail on Sunday, but we also have news that Gordon Brown is to make his first Commons speech since the general election. That's right, after 174 paid days of, erm, indiscernible activity, Gordon will tomorrow insist that maintenance on Britain's two new aircraft carriers should be carried out on a Scottish shipyard, rather than in France. Everyone else is surprised that he didn't get that written into the contracts already. The return of the Gord throws up some questions for Ed Miliband. It's not just the speech tomorrow, but rather the release of our former Prime Minister's book on 7 December.

Peter Hoskin

The Tories rally after the Spending Review

From our UK edition

It's just one poll, but today's YouGov effort for the Sunday Times seems to underline many of the themes of recent weeks. It has the Tories on 42 percent, 5 points ahead of Labour on 37 percent, and with the Lib Dems on 13 percent. So the Spending Review – accompanied, as it has been, by rows over housing and child benefits – has not yet had a precipitous effect on the Tories' poll rating. If anything, YouGov have had the blue vote rallying since 20 October. As always we should be wary of drawing too many conclusions from the shifting landscape of opinion polls and surveys, but some of YouGov's subsidiary findings could help explain the Tories' position. First up, 72 percent of respondents back the coalition's plan to impose a cap on housing benefit.

Saturday

David Blackburn

The ginger rodent

From our UK edition

I wonder what they'll come up with for Uncle Vince? Nick Clegg is a closet Tory (nice homophobic overtone there), and Danny Alexander reminds anti-persecution supremo Harriet Harman of a ginger rodent. Alexander deigned to respond, saying:  'I am proud to be ginger and rodents do valuable work cleaning up the mess others lead behind. Red Squirrel deserves to survive, unlike Labour.'   Aside from being witless, the problem with Labour's assault  on senior Lib Dem politicians is that each one makes a future Lib-Lab pact ever more unlikely. After all, there aren't so many Lib Dems to insult.

Friday

Peter Hoskin

The Miliband deception

From our UK edition

Ed Miliband's speech in Scotland this afternoon was a strange beast. So much of it was typical of the new Labour leader: for instance, the incessant stream of words like "optimism," "new" and "change". Some of it was rather surprising, such as the lengthy and warm tribute he paid to Gordon Brown at the start. One passage on the flaws of the Big Society (from a Labour perspective, natch) set out a philosophically intriguing dividing line. And his challenge over housing benefit was quite swashbuckling, in a Westminster-ish kind of way. But there's one line I'd like to focus on, because I'm sure it will come up again and again. Namely, this one: "Remember, our government paid down the debt before the crisis hit." Really?

James Forsyth

Voters think the new generations look old and tired

From our UK edition

There’s an intriguing detail in the latest YouGov poll. The number of people seeing Labour as old and tired is back up to 44 percent, which is where it was before Ed Miliband became leader.   The concern for Labour must be that the youthful, vigorous optimism that Ed Miliband is trying to promote hasn’t cut through to the public yet. Admittedly it is early days. But first impressions do matter in politics. Indeed, I must admit to being slightly surprised that the Tories are still generally ahead in the polls. I thought that the spending review would push Labour into the lead.   Something that, contrary to the media perception, might be helping the Tories is the ongoing rows over housing benefit and child benefit.

Peter Hoskin

More perspective on housing benefit

From our UK edition

A useful reminder of the opinion polls on housing benefit from ConservativeHome's Harry Phibbs: "...in coming out with such hyperbole Labour show themselves to be out of touch with the voters. An ICM poll in June asked: "Do you support or oppose imposing a maximum weekly limit of £400 on Housing Benefit." Support was 68% with 23% opposed. Even among Labour voters there was strong support - by 57% to 35%. A YouGov poll in August asked: "Here are some policies the coalition government have announced in their first hundred days. For each one please say if you oppose or support it?" Among them was: "Putting a limit on housing benefit." 72% expressed support. 17% said they were opposed.

Thursday

David Blackburn

Labour’s hypocrisy on the EU budget

From our UK edition

Labour’s Shadow Europe Minister, Wayne David, has been busy castigating David Cameron for his apparent failure to secure an EU Budget freeze. He says, ‘It is imperative that we do have a freeze on the EU budget’. Quite so, why then did Labour MEPs vote against an amendement to freeze it?

Alex Massie

Labour’s Augustinian Approach to Welfare Reform

From our UK edition

Sometimes you wonder why government ministers ever speak to journalists. Exhibit A: the fool who told Ben Brogan that the coalition's changes to Housing Benefit amount to a modern version of "the Highland Clearances*". Sure enough, Jon Cruddas picks up on this in the New Statesman this week. Reading Cruddas you'd think that capping rent allowances and subsidies will bring about the End of Britain As We Know And Love It. For reals: This brutal social engineering will have profound effects on families across the country.