Labour party

Thursday

James Forsyth

Timing contrition

James Crabtree, a Labour SPAD turned managing editor of Prospect, has a good piece in the new Prospect about how the first step to recovery for Labour after the next election, assuming they lose, will be saying sorry. Crabtree argues that even if the Tory majority is small, Labour would be ill-advised to move straight into oppositional mode, attacking every Tory cut. Rather, he argues, the party needs to understand that its “brand is now nearly as contaminated as the Tories before it.”   One of the challenges for the Tories should they win the next election will be bringing home to the public just what an appalling state Labour

Peter Hoskin

Brown’s class war could doom Labour for years

A lot of pixels have been expended on Labour’s new class war and soak-the-rich strategies, so it’s worth highlighting the in-a-nutshell argument which Tom Harris deploys against them on his blog: “Rather than using opinion polls as a basis on which to judge the wisdom of class politics, let’s take a rather different measure: general election results. In 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992, Labour promised tax increases (but only for the wealthy) and got hammered. In 1997, 2001 and 2005, we pledged not to increase the basic or higher rates of tax. And golly! Look what happened!” Ok, correlation and cause aren’t necessarily the same thing.  But there’s a strong

Matthew Sinclair

The spectre at the climate change feast

Today the TaxPayers’ Alliance is releasing a new report which sets out the huge and excessive burden that green taxes impose on families and business across the UK. At the moment, 14 percent of domestic bill costs are the result of climate change policies.  Increasing the price of energy hits the poor and elderly hardest – which, in turn, increases poverty and benefit dependency.  At the same time, 21 percent of industrial electricity bills are the result of climate change policies.  If we want to make our economy less dependent on financial services, driving up a major part of many manufacturing firms’ costs isn’t the way to do it. Despite

Peter Hoskin

What will today mean for the expenses saga?

So MPs have until the end of today to declare whether they’re appealing against Sir Thomas Legg’s request that they repay certain expenses claims.  Three have already done just that, one from each of the main parties: Jeremy Browne, Frank Cook and Bernard Jenkin.  You imagine that more may follow throughout the day, especially given the rumblings that the Legg review contained a fair few errors. Now, it’s only fair that MPs have a right of appeal – but you still wonder what it will mean for the expenses saga more generally.  From the public’s perspective, a swathe of appeals could look like MPs resisting reform.  From Parliament’s perspective, it

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Unless they defuse the issue, the Tories will face Ashcroft questions every day until the election

If PMQs today showed anything, it’s just how eager the Tories’ opponents are to bring up the issue of Lord Ashcroft.  Vince Cable set the ball rolling by referring to the Tory deputy chairman as a “non dom”, and Harriet Harman gleefully followed up by firing questions in William Hague’s direction.  She was cut off – and rightly so – by John Bercow.  But the insinuations about the Lord and his tax status had already been made. Now, you could say that this is pretty low stuff from Labour and the Lib Dems.  After all, David Cameron pledged earlier this week to legislate so that all MPs and peers are

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Meet Farmer Mandelson | 15 December 2009

Our Christmas double edition is out today, and is choc full of writers to keep y’all entertained over the festive season. Someone who certainly entertained me is Lord Mandelson. I interviewed him just after Charles Moore’s disclosures about the shooting party: he didn’t shoot, he says, but was at a large dinner chez Rothschild where Saif al-Gaddafi was present. What’s Gaddafi like, I asked? Is he all right kind of chap? PM: “I don’t regard him as an alright chap or a bad chap, I mean how can you judge?” FN: “I thought you knew him a little bit.” PM: “I’ve met the chap three times, once in a meeting

James Forsyth

Should an opposition sell itself as a responsible government?

One of the Tories’ favoured lines recently has been that they are acting like a responsible government while Labour is behaving like an irresponsible opposition. But I wonder if this attitude is entirely healthy for an opposition, or whether it ends up blunting its campaigning edge. For example, the Tories’ refusal to say for definite that they will repeal Labour’s planned increase in national insurance stems from their view that they aren’t certain where they would find the £8 billion from. But given the number of black holes and blanks in the PBR and that the deficit is over £170 billion this seems slightly absurd. Labour’s plan to make a

David Blackburn

The Labour leadership question hasn’t been answered

Rabble-rouser and bruiser-in-chief Charles Clarke has taken a hatchet to the government’s highly political Pre-Budget Report. Writing on his blog, Clarke argues: ‘He (Brown) felt that the main purpose of this pre-election Pre-Budget Report was to recycle his old political dividing lines.   This weakness can only come from fear of discussion of our past failures and fear that it is too dangerous to set out our future plans.   The real danger for Labour is that this weakness will pave the way to political defeat in 2010.’ The Labour leadership crisis has retreated from the limelight recently, but the spectre of internecine war after a whipping at the polls

Monday

Peter Hoskin

Only Ireland and Iceland have had a bigger debt explosion than the UK

An argument put forward by some Labour types is that we’re not really facing a debt crisis at all.  “Yes, the national debt levels are bad,” they say, “but we started off at a low level in comparison to other countries, so we can absorb the deficits we’re racking up.” Well, you can take issue with the idea that we had “low levels” of debt before the crisis kicked in – but the real mistake this statement makes is to ignore the rate at which we’ve accumulated debt.  As the latest OECD data shows, UK debt is set to rise faster than any other nation save for Iceland and Ireland:

Peter Hoskin

Things the Speaker shouldn’t discuss in public

As Andrew Sparrow says, it’s well worth reading Iain Dale’s interview with John Bercow in the latest issue Total Politics.  It’s a fun read, mostly because the Speaker is remarkably candid – a quality that’s normally to be admired in a politician.  But I can’t help thinking that he made a mistake in admitting this:   “I received various approaches from various senior people in the Labour party saying: ‘Aw, you know, we’d love to have you on board. We think you’re being discarded by the Conservatives. We think you’d be quite at home with us.’ Senior people, not in a formal setting, but people sidling up to you –

Peter Hoskin

Balls beats the drum for investment

Oh, look, Ed Balls is talking about “investment” again.  This time it’s an address on the Government’s Children’s Plan, and, judging by the preview in today’s Independent, it’s all going to be about how much more money his department is spending.  I doubt Alistair Darling will be impresssed – especially as much of that money was strong-armed out of the Treasury in the early hours of Wednesday morning last week.  And I doubt that some of Balls’s other colleagues will be too amused either.  Their departments will be subject to even deeper cuts thanks to his brinksmanship. But you suspect that Balls isn’t just hoping to rile his fellow ministers

Martin Bright

Labour Now Managing the Scale of the Defeat

I was struggling towards an analysis of the true meaning of the PBR in Friday’s post, but a couple of the Sunday commentators were a little closer to the mark. John Rentoul, in an article with the provocative headline Labour is Unelectable Again the Independent on Sunday’s chief political commentator has finally announced the death of New Labour. For him, Labour’s latest pronouncement on the bankers’ bonuses is the final death rattle. Labour sorely needs to move beyond the philosophy that made it so attractive to the electorate for a decade but at the moment it is finding it difficult to put one foot in front of the other. Matthew D’Ancona gets

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Playing politics with the public finances

It has started. The Labour attack unit is out today talking about a “Tory VAT rise” – as per Paddy Hennessy’s scoop. Osborne stated his (to me, relatively paltry) position on the deficit: that he’d reduce it faster than Labour but can’t say how much. The Labour attack unit keeps partying like its 1999 with the “Tory cuts” line, now augmented with a “Tory tax rise.” Here are the words which the attack unit has crafted for Stephen Timms, chief secretary to the Treasury: “George Osborne refuses to say what services he would cut or what taxes he would increase in order to cut the deficit ‘further and faster’ than

Peter Hoskin

The Ed Balls approach to fiscal management

Considering the fiscal crisis we face, this revelation in Andrew Rawnsley’s column is particularly dispiriting: “[Gordon Brown] has been egged on by Ed Balls [to make more spending promises], partly because the schools secretary is also obsessed with that old dividing line, partly because he wanted to be able to boast that he had won more money for his department. I am reliably told that the wrangling between the schools secretary and the chancellor went on into the early hours of the morning on the day of the PBR itself. The result was that some of the extra spending beaten out of Mr Darling by Mr Balls did not get

Saturday

James Forsyth

Labour fell between two stools this week

There were two possible strategic approaches Labour could have taken to the PBR. One option was to surprise everyone by actually making cuts. They then could have said, “we’ve made all the cuts we can. Anything else would really hurt frontline services”. This would have put them in position to challenge the Tories as to what they would cut to reduce the deficit faster. The other was to be really populist. They could have carried on spending, bashed the bankers, soaked the rich, and hope that they could get away without a crisis in the markets until the election. Instead, they’ve fallen between two stools. They’ve increased public spending, which

Peter Hoskin

Has Mandelson given up on Brown?

For any Kremlinologists among us, Peter Oborne’s latest column in the Mail sure is a juicy read.  It claims that Mandelson and Brown are “at war again” – only, this time, insiders say the damage to their relationship is “irreparable”.  The Business Secretary is said to be “bitterly unhappy” with Labour’s class war strategy, and with Brown’s reluctance to deal with the fiscal crisis.  And – as Martin highlighted the other day – he wants out. None of this is too surprising.  Indeed, Mandelson has been conspicuous by his absence from the government’s PBR media drive, fuelling more than a few Westminster mumblings about his commitment to the Brownite cause. 

Peter Hoskin

Why not just scrap ID cards, then?

So the protracted, wheezing death of ID cards continues, with Alistair Darling admitting in today’s Telegraph that: “Most of the expenditure is on biometric passports which you and I are going to require shortly to get into the US. Do we need to go further than that? Well, probably not.” The government are letting it be known that this doesn’t contradict their existing policy, but their shifting rhetoric remains striking.  Last year, we had the then Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, proposing that British citizens should be able to choose between a card and a biometric passport.  Earlier this year, Alan Johnson said that ID cards wouldn’t be compulsory for British

Friday

Peter Hoskin

Why class wars don’t work

Well, it seems like Paul Richards – a former aide to Hazel Blears – wants to corner the market in quietly persuasive demolitions of his own party’s strategy.  If you remember, he wrote a perceptive piece on Labour’s shortcomings in the aftermath of the Norwich North by-election, which we highlighted here on Coffee House.  And, today, he’s at it again, with a very readable article in PR Week on why the class war won’t work.  His three reasons why are worth noting down: “First, it is hypocritical. The Labour Party has a disproportionately far higher number of former public schoolboys and schoolgirls in parliament and in the government than a

Thursday

Alex Massie

Another PBR, Please

That would be a Pabst Blue Ribbon, of course, though another, better, Pre-Budget Report would be welcome too. As Fraser says, the public finances are ruined and will not be rebuilt for many years. Bill Jamieson’s piece in the Scotsman framed the matter rather well and explained why the level of debt matters more than, I suspect, many people think it does: But why should debt figures matter so much? This is why: Next year, we will be paying £44.4bn in debt interest alone – never mind debt falling due for repayment. That debt interest in 2010-11 will absorb the entire proceeds from capital gains tax, inheritance tax, stamp duty,

Fraser Nelson

Gordon Brown’s one and only legacy

I will sign off tonight with this sickening graph from the earlier IFS presentation – showing the extent to which Gordon Brown’s economic incompetence has transformed the public finances for a generation. Servicing this debt will absorb money that would otherwise be spent creating jobs, lifting people out of poverty, advancing education, promoting prosperity. The leading article in the magazine this week finishes with these words, which came to mind when I saw the above graph: “It will be no surprise if UK public debt has been downgraded by the election; if so, a gilt buyers’ strike will become more than a theoretical possibility. The new government will face a