First, David Miliband was telling Brownies about the public finances. Now, his brother's at it too. Here's what he told the Daily Politics earlier: "Over thirteen years, Labour did increase spending on public services … In the coming five years, the Conservative coalition wants to undo all of that increase in spending. So they want to return to a time before 1997.
Who'd have thought it? There's David Miliband getting all self-righteous about the "cons" in George Osborne's Budget, when - oh dear - he slips in a small con of his own. Here's the relevant passage: "[The Budget] was avoidable. Labour set out plans to cut the deficit by half over the next Parliament. The Tories have chosen to cut the whole of the deficit and more to the tune of £32billion in public services and £11billion in welfare." And here, going off Labour's own plans, is what he should have written: "[The Budget] was avoidable. Labour set out plans to cut the structural deficit by 'more than two-thirds' over the next Parliament.
Yvette Cooper has condemned IDS’ ‘nasty’ rhetoric this morning and claimed that the government’s proposals are about ideological cuts, not welfare reform. It’s simple, but effective. IDS’ reforms are both radical and necessary. The plan is to incentivise movement out of areas of welfare dependency with regional tax breaks and housing guarantees. There is a clear link between this policy and the non-EU migrant cap, which will protect at least some low skilled or unskilled jobs. A policy that encourages fairness, aspiration and a first chance in life for those condemned to worklessness by accident of birth. But the coalition is losing the rhetorical argument.
ICM’s post Budget poll for the Sunday Telegraph confirms YouGov’s finding that the Lib Dems have dropped after the Budget. It has them down five to 16. By contrast, the Tories are up two to 41. Labour have also risen four to 35. YouGov has the Lib Dems on 16, the Tories 43 and Labour 36. These polls matter because they will add to the jitteriness that some left-leaning Lib Dem feel about such a fiscally conservative Budget. There is a feeling in Lib Dem circles that they could do with some things to please and reassure their base in the coming weeks. The Coalition is planning a policy push before the Commons breaks for the summer and I’d be surprised if there aren’t some things announced soon that are ‘Lib Dem wins’.
There’s one thing that people want to talk about today and that’s Diane Abbott’s appearance on This Week last night. As you can see above, it was a total disaster for Abbott. She was all over the place on her taxi claims and she got into a total tangle on whether she had meant to imply with her comment that ‘West Indian mothers will go to the wall for their children’ that West Indian mothers were better than mothers of other ethnicities. Under repeated questioning, all she would say is that she had said all she was going to say on the subject. Even when it was clear that this answer was not sufficient, Abbott had nothing to add.
A very interesting interview with Il Tartanissimo in the Times today in which Salmond accepts, quite candidly, that independence isn't happening any time soon: “The centre of gravity in Scottish politics currently is clearly not independence,” he admitted. “You must campaign for what is good for Scotland as well as campaigning for independence.” A cynic - not that there are any of those around here - might argue that there's a contradiction in that second sentence but, in this instance, a cynic would be unfair on Eck. It's really quite rare to come across a politician being quite this candid about what is, after all, supposed to be his party's reason for being. Nor did this alarming outbreak of common sense stop there.
Paul Waugh has news that David Miliband has received the backing of USDAW, the shop workers’ union. Block union voting is a thing of the past, but this endorsement is a surprise nonetheless. It’s lazy to categorize Miliband as a ‘Blairite’, but he is certainly on the right of the party – vigorously pro-European, pro-business and an avowed social democrat. USDAW’s general secretary John Hannett is said to be impressed by Miliband’s defence of Labour’s record in office. To be honest, Diane Abbott is the only candidate who has lacerated the Blair/Brown governments, all the others are ‘proud of our record in government but recognise the need for change.
The unthinkable has happened. I’ve started to admire Batty Hattie’s performances at PMQs. Her career may be over, her party may be trashed, her movement may drift leaderless, and her colleagues’ reputation may have been shot to pieces but Hattie always turns up and gives it everything. Nature has not overburdened her with talent. She can’t count. She can hardly speak. She reacts to events about as quickly as a self-timing oven but she has epic quantities of pluck. Every week she pounds out into the surf, like a battleship equipped for the last war but two, and heads for the centre of the fray where she refuses to sink under the heaviest fire.
David Cameron was on punchy form at PMQs today. He jibed that in Harriet Harman’s case the Budget Red Book should be called ‘the unread book’ and called Labour backbenchers ‘dunces’ who didn’t know what the last government was planning. The Cameron Harman exchange was interesting. Harman had come armed with some classic follow-up questions using the details in the Red Book. Cameron didn’t want to engage on the detail, suggesting that Harman might have had a point. But his ability to attack Labour for having got the country into this mess allowed him to win the exchange on points quite comfortably. Bob Russell, a Lib Dem MP who said he may oppose the Budget yesterday, roared out three nil after Harman’s first three questions.
Have you been impressed by Labour's response to their election defeat? Hmmm. Next question: is anyone listening to Labour's complaints that the Liberal Democrats have "betrayed" themselves and everything that is nice and sweet and wholesome about this pleasant land? Best move on from that one too. Sunny Hundal makes a good argument that, at the very least, it is much too soon for Labour to be taking this line. It's a good post but it misses one trick, I think: Labour continue to suffer from the category error of believing that liberals are really Labour voters who don't quite realise this. But this is not the case and it's quite evident that Nick Clegg is no Charles Kennedy.
By her usual standards, Harriet Harman was quite effective in her response to George Osborne's Budget earlier. She was clear, direct and had a few gags at Vince Cable's expense. And she also benefitted from what, on the surface, was a strong central attack: the Office for Budget Responsibility, she said, has downgraded its jobs forecasts on the back of the Budget. And so, she followed, this is a Budget which destroys jobs. But there were a few things that Harman wasn't letting on. First, as Jim Pickard points out at the FT, the OBR forecasts haven't shifted by all that much from their previous incarnation. And, second, they are still more optmistic than most independent forecasts (conveniently collected by the Treasury here).
It's days like this when you realise just how stuck Labour are in a Brownite groove. Everywhere you turn, there's some leadership candidate or other attacking the government for choosing to cut public spending this year. Ed Miliband claims that the Lib Dems have been "completely macho … completely cavalier" about cuts. Andy Burnham says that this year could "damage us in the long run". And even those who aren't chasing the leadership are getting in on the act: Alistair Darling writes that the coalition has "a fiscal policy that undermines fragile growth". So we already know what Labour's broad response to this week's Budget will look like. But it got me a-wondering: what will their response to next year's Budget be?
While we're enjoying a burst of optimism about the coalition, it's worth highlighting the news that John Hutton has been put in charge of a review into public sector pensions. As I've said before, Hutton was one of the most quietly impressive figures of the New Labour era, and someone who impressed during his time at work and pensions. Even the Tories' current welfare agenda owes a lot to Hutton: he commission the Freud Review which set the parameters for welfare reform in this country, and he fought on its behalf against a reluctant Gordon Brown. In a wonkish sort of way, it will be exciting to see what happens when he turns his mind to the crucial issue of public sector pensions.
For all of the nine years that he worked, first as official spokesman for Tony Blair and then as Director of Communications for the government, Alastair Campbell was obliged to defend a huge lie: that all was well at the heart of the New Labour project when, manifestly, it was not. Gradually, as the years passed, the tensions surfaced and whispers that something was amiss reached the outside world, but by and large — and in no small measure due to the extraordinary resilience of Blair and Campbell — the lid was kept on. Until now. The fault lines are apparent from the outset. This volume covers the three years from the day of John Smith’s death on 12 May 1994 to the triumphal progress to Downing Street on 1 May 1997.
I doubt David Cameron will have many better days in government than this. Considering the government cancelled a hospital project yesterday, today has passed as one long photo-op, free of incident. It began with Theresa May banning a radical Islamist cleric, Zakir Naik, displaying a resolve that eluded her immediate predecessors. The papers were full of Cameron’s ‘coup’ in Brussels yesterday; the only major news story that might have unnerved Cameron was the FT’s research into Tory immigration policy, which the FT calculates will hit growth and raise taxes. It was too esoteric to hit the TV screens, so too the cuts in arts funding. It must have been a happy breakfast in No 10 this morning.
Thank God for Iain Martin, who has called Labour’s response to the Gove ‘Free schools’ idea what is: ‘moronic’. He writes: 'Labour warned that the resulting experiment risks creating a “two-tier” education system. Good grief. And Britain doesn’t have a two-tier schools system now? Actually it’s more like 10 tiers. In this troubling context, claiming that Britain somehow has a splendid one-tier education system that must be preserved is moronic.’ If enacted and delivered, the Gove school reforms will transform education: either they will inaugurate extraordinary improvements, or they’ll be catastrophic.
Well done David Miliband, for writing an article in the Guardian that is free of wonkery and abstractions. Miliband deserves applause for being the first Labour leadership contender to address public spending cuts with reasoned analysis, not ideological retorts. Also, he is right to urge George Osborne not to sell the public stakes in RBS and Lloyds at a bargain price. But his central thesis merits censure. He perverts recent history to fit an avowedly left-wing analysis of public spending. Miliband writes: ‘Let's take the deficit argument head on. We need to remember what the Tories want the country to forget: it was falling tax receipts – not rising spending – that primarily caused the deficit to rise.
I was expecting drama when the Labour leadership circus called at Newsnight yesterday. Alas, the show whimpered and wheezed to a halt. A contest to determine the party’s future continues to gaze into the past. Assessing failure is essential to renewal, but the candidates are yet to offer anything substantively new. Ed Balls and David Miliband shared one telling exchange. Balls has presented himself as the traditional candidate, and he would have you believe he speaks the language of Mrs Duffy. Gordon Brown’s hideous solecism in Rochdale revealed that he and his government were out of touch on issues such as housing and immigration. David Miliband is the centrist candidate and he dissociates himself from Balls and Duffy-speak.
With ill-repressed horror, James Macintyre reports that the remnants of New Labour fear that Diane Abbott might win the Labour leadership, courtesy of the preferential vote. Mildly amusing I suppose. If Ed Balls would be a catastrophe of Footian proportions as leader what would Abbott be? There are no historical parallels. I can’t see this latter day Rosa Luxemburg enticing Labour members. But if she does, then David Miliband, that auteur of absurdity, is to blame. Abbott’s weapon is communication. Unlike her four opponents, she doesn’t sound like an under-manager at Furniture Village. She is accessible, particularly on television – and the hopefuls will be up before Paxman tonight.
David Cameron’s address to the House contained no surprises. NATO and its allies are 6 months into a strategy to stabilise Afghanistan. All sides of the House were agreed that Britain should fulfil its commitments, but remain in Afghanistan not a day longer than necessary. That date is unknown. Like Blair and Brown before him, Cameron aspires to ‘improve Afghan security’. ‘Stability’ surely means the expulsion of al Qaeda from Afghanistan. How likely is that without the complete co-operation of the Taliban? (At what cost would that be secured?) And, as Julian Lewis MP pointed out, is al Qaeda more dangerous in Afghanistan than it is The Yemen, Somalia or Pakistan? The grand strategy remains indistinct and an outright victory impossible.
