Labour party

Friday

Martin Bright

Shadow Cabinet or Cabinet of the Weird?

The real problem for the Labour Party with the election of Ed Miliband is not the man himself, who is easy to like and, by instinct, a centrist politician from the New Labour tradition (however hard he tries to disown it now). No, the difficulty is the oddness of it the whole business. If the brother versus brother leadership contest had not been enough to cause the nation to raise a collective eyebrow, now we have the bizarre spectacle of a husband and wife taking the jobs of shadow home and foreign secretaries. This is just dead weird.  Every professional couple knows how difficult it is to hold together two careers and a family life.

Alex Massie

Don’t Over-Estimate Ed Miliband

In the grand scheme of things there are few less important things than the Shadow Cabinet. Nevertheless it's the only toy in town today and so must be chewed until something fresh and shinier comes along. Poor Ed Miliband, however, was in a lose-lose situation. Appoint Ed Balls to the Treasury brief and risk looking weak and in thrall to an over-bearing Shadow Chancellor; appoint someone else to the job and look weak too, scared of your erstwhile rival and a certified "Big Beast". Nevertheless, looking for a compromise candidare was reasonable. But choosing Alan Johnson (rather than, say, Jim Murphy) is a blunder. By his own admission Johnson wasn't up to the top job, so what makes anyone think he's up to the second most important job in the Shadow Cabinet?

Peter Hoskin

Ed Miliband may have just made the defining choice of his leadership

There are several eyecatching appointments in Ed Miliband's shadow cabinet. Ed Balls at Shadow Home puts Labour's most vicious scrapper up against a wobbly government department. Yvette Cooper as Shadow Foreign Secretary is a suitable reward for her showing in the elections, but it is a counterintuitive use of her background in economics. MiliE loyalists Sadiq Khan and John Denham have duly received plum jobs in Justice and Business, respectively. But perhaps the most surprising appointment is also the most important: Alan Johnson as Shadow Chancellor. On a purely presentational level, you can see what Ed Miliband is thinking.

Peter Hoskin

Breaking: Alan Johnson is shadow chancellor…

...and Yvette Cooper is shadow foreign secretary. Ed Balls gets shadow home. So, looks as though Ed Miliband has bypassed the family psychodrama with an appointment that few expected, or even thought of, until this morning. Johnson was 16/1 with Ladbrokes for the shadow chancellorship going into today. UPDATE: Paul Waugh has the full list. Here it is: Leader of the Opposition --- Rt. Hon.

David Blackburn

How should Miliband respond to the child benefit reform?

Daniel Finkelstein and Philip Collins’ email exchanges are always enlightening. This week, they discussed child benefit. Both think it has altered the markings on the playing field of politics. Ed Miliband is yet to respond: how should he? ‘From: Daniel Finkelstein To: Philip Collins If you were Ed Miliband, where would you go now on child benefit? First option: total opposition to the Government’s plan. You get to hoover up discontent but you don’t look much like a governing force, do you? And it seems hypocritical. Plus, you said you were going to support the Government on many cuts. If not this, then what? Second: you go with it. You look big, you look grown up, but lots won’t like it.

Peter Hoskin

Cameron sells the Big Society to the public sector

David Cameron clearly wants us to waltz into the weekend with the Big Society on our minds – so he's written an article on the idea for the Sun. It rattles through all the usual words and phrases, such as "responsibility" and "people power", but it strikes me how he applies them just as much to the public sector as to the general public. This is something that he did in his conference speech, describing the "Big Society spirit" of a group of nurses: "It's the spirit that I saw in a group of NHS maternity nurses in my own constituency, increasingly frustrated by the way they were managed and handled, who wanted to set up a co-op to use their own expertise, their ideas, their contacts to provide a better serice for the mums in their area.

Thursday

James Forsyth

Osborne has a laid a trap

One of the most intriguing questions about the decision to take child benefit away from households with a higher rate taxpayer in them is whether it marks the beginning of the end for universal benefits. The quotes today from Michael Fallon, the Tory vice-chairman, certainly suggest that it does. Fallon ridicules Ed Miliband with the line: “He wants to tax the poor to give benefits to the better off.” Now, if you accept that the poor are currently being taxed to provide child benefits for the rich (a slight exaggeration given that higher rate taxpayers contribute far more than they take out in services) then this argument applies with equal force to all other universal benefits.

Andrew Haldenby

Hutton points the way forward on pensions

John Hutton's interim report on public sector pensions today will go down as one of the most important moments in the public service reform story.  John Hutton doesn't just set out the principles for putting public services on a sustainable footing, although he does do that (by explaining the inadequate levels of contributions into these schemes).  More importantly, he confronts head-on the problem that public sector pensions pose for the opening up of public services to competition. One of the key reasons that many companies have waited on the sidelines of the public sector for years is the disparity between public and private pensions.

Alex Massie

Jim Murphy for Shadow Chancellor?

Good stuff from Iain Martin: [Ed Miliband will] have to deal with Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper. Balls is an impressively robust “big beast” who wants to be shadow Chancellor, but Ed Miliband may not fancy sub-contracting his economic policy to someone so tricky to control. Subverting Lyndon Johnson’s famous rule, keeping Ed Balls inside the tent makes no difference - he’ll probably still urinate on his colleagues. Indeed. The Balls Problem is a tricky one. Ed Balls is a fine attack dog perhaps the best, certainly the most ferocious, Labour have. But if Miliband gives Balls the Treasury brief there's every chance that the Shadow Chancellor will eclipse the Leader of the Opposition.

Peter Hoskin

Waiting for the shadow cabinet

You can say what you like about Labour's penchant for internal elections, but at least it makes for good, political entertainment. Tonight, the results of the shadow cabinet elections will be released, and we'll discover which of the 49 nominees made it into the final 19. Then it will fall to Ed Miliband to force some very square pegs into the round holes on his party's front bench. Good luck with that, Mr Miliband. According to most observers, Yvette Copper is favourite to come top – a forecast supported by a readers' poll published on Left Foot Forward today. In the same poll, Ed Balls finished second. It rather encapsulates the toughest choice facing Ed Miliband: who to pick as shadow chancellor?

Peter Hoskin

Delaying the cuts

Put aside all the post-match analysis of David Cameron's speech: the most intriguing story in the papers this morning is this one in the FT. It claims that the Treasury is working on plans to "reprofile" the spending cuts, which basically means "delay" them. The idea would be to push the bulk of the cuts back to the end of this Parliament. And the underlying concern is, apparently, that early cuts could trigger various financial penalties, such as those for breaking contracts. The paper even suggests that ministers are worried that, "deep deficit reduction in 2011-12 could undermine the fragile recovery." The Treasury have firmly denied the story, and I'd certainly be surprised if we saw significant delays in the cuts.

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Boris well ahead in the first Mayoral poll

The first Boris vs Ken poll of the season carries an obvious health warning: there are other candidates to come, not to mention another one-and-half years of the current mayoral term. Yet Tories might still be pleased that their man is 9 points ahead of his predecessor and main rival at this stage. And that's even with Labour beating out the Tories, in the same poll, when it comes to London's general election voting intentions. Andrew Gilligan puts two and two together to create a striking parallel: Boris is more popular than the Tory party in London, whereas Ken is less popular than Labour. Stir in the fact that Livingstone is polling lower than he did in the 2008 election, and his enforced spell on the sidelines has clearly done little to bolster his reputation.

James Forsyth

This is not a 10p tax moment

Last night, one minister came up to me nervously and asked, ‘is this our 10p tax moment?’ He was talking, obviously, about the decision to take child benefit away from households with a higher rate taxpayer in them.   My answer was no. The comparisons with Brown’s removal of the 10p tax rate miss a crucial point: Brown tried to hide what he was doing. In his final Budget statement to the Commons, the abolition of the 10p rate wasn’t even mentioned. Instead Brown boasted about a 2p reduction in the basic rate, to huge cheers from the Labour benches.   By contrast, the Tories have been upfront about the fact that there are losers from this change.

Martin Bright

Searching for the Big Society

I had been hoping for some answers at the Policy Exchange fringe meeting last night, helpfully entitiled "The Big Society, What does it really mean?" Unfortunately, I wasn't alone at Conservative Party conference in my search for some clarity on this issue and it was quite impossible to get into the event. Note to my friends at PX, the Big Society needs more room to breathe. Everyone here is scrambling to get a piece of the Big Society action. There is something a little unseemly about it. This is because there is business to be had as the functions of the state are further contracted out. For the fragile organisations of the voluntary sector being inside or outside the Big Society marquee is a matter of life and death.

Monday

James Forsyth

The beginning of the end of universal benefits

The most important line in George Osborne’s speech was this one: “It’s very difficult to justify taxing people on low income to pay for the child benefit of those earning so much more than them.” Logically, this argument applies equally to all other universal benefits. Why should someone on £12,000 a year be paying tax to help cover the cost of Ken Clarke’s pension? Personally, I’m quite happy to see universal benefits go. The end of universal benefits would, though, change the nature of the welfare state. Quite rapidly, it would become a safety net not a contributory system. This is why Labour will oppose so vigorously taking child benefit away from those on the higher rate of tax.

Peter Hoskin

Osborne takes to the stage, armed with cuts

Rewind the tape to last year's Tory conference, and David Cameron was assuring us that, "It will be a steep climb. But the view from the summit will be worth it." Today, it falls to George Osborne to tell us more about both the arduousness off the ascent and the beauty of that view – although I expect that there will be a heavy empasis on the former. Already, the main passages are spilling into the papers and, as you'd expect, it's mostly cuts and debt. On that front, the main argument seems to be similar to that made by Nick Clegg in Liverpool: that the longer it takes us to pay down our debts, the more money we waste thanks to interest payments and the like. Or as Osborne will put it, "Delay now means pay more later. Everyone knows it's the most basic rule of debt.

Saturday

David Blackburn

What to do with Balls?

Ed Balls is adept at opposition – making a case throughout the recent leadership hustings for immigration controls that he knows are unworkable in practice. Mike Smithson reports than a senior Lib Dem thinks Ed Balls would be an ideal opponent for Liam Fox, the man to exploit the coalition’s most obvious weakness. It’s a salivating prospect for the independent observer – confrontation between two skilled and principled communicators – and if anyone can damage a Conservative-led government on defence it is Balls. But there’s the rub. In their ideal worlds, Balls and Fox don’t differ on the broad principles of defence policy.

Friday

David Blackburn

Many Lib Dems want to be part of the New Generation

Politics tends to ruin an evening in the pub. On Wednesday, I came across a friend who had been a card-carrying Lib Dem prior to the coalition's formation. He confessed that he'd been impressed by Ed Miliband's speech and had joined the Labour party. Several other Lib Dem supporters attending agreed that Ed Miliband is a more attractive option than David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Everyone else in this small band (mostly unaffiliated voters with the odd furtive Tory) believed that Labour has probably elected the wrong Miliband, but were antagonistic to Labour in any case.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

A small step for Labour, not a giant leap

I had expected Ed Miliband to do pretty well in the polls. He's unknown, and voters haven't had a chance to dislike him yet. That's not an insult – familiarity breeds contempt in politics, and the public are normally quite quick to give a new guy the benefit of the doubt. Witness the Clegg bubble. But tomorrow's Guardian shows precious little sign of a conference bounce. The two parties were level before the conferences – a remarkable achievment for a leaderless party. The Tories took three years to do the same. It was one of many reasons that inspired our cover story last week, "Labour leaps forward". The illustration, by Morten Morland, was a horse without a rider. What might Labour achieve with a jockey?

Peter Hoskin

What to make of Warsi’s electoral fraud claim?

Exactly as the headline says, really. Interviewed by Mehdi Hasan in this week's New Statesman, Sayeeda Warsi claims that the Tories "lost" at least three seats in the election because of electoral fraud. The article observes: 'This is the first time a senior minister has made such a blunt and specific allegation about the impact of electoral fraud on the general election result. Can she reveal the names of those seats? 'I think it would be wrong to start identifying them,' she says, but adds: 'It is predominantly within the Asian community. I have to look back and say we didn’t do well in those communities, but was there something over and above that we could have done? Well, actually not, if there is going to be voter fraud.