Uk politics

Have we ever had a more political Chancellor of the Exchequer? I doubt it. The political skills of George Osborne were on full display in July’s Summer Budget. Here he tweaked Labour’s tail particularly violently by pinching the party’s higher minimum wage strategy that all too many within Labour thought would be a winning card at the last election. I still wonder whether he sees the revolutionary potential of his Labour-baiting initiative, the ‘National Living Wage’. With a little more development it could become the most important game changer in Britain’s post-war welfare debate.

Given few knew who Jeremy Corbyn was before the summer, chances are that few will know who John McDonnell is either. Well, here's your quick guide. He was first elected in 1997, having previously served on the Greater London Council as member for Hayes and Harlington (the constituency he represents in Parliament). He is chair of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, and worked as a researcher and official for the National Union of Mineworkers and the TUC. And here's what else you need to know about the new Shadow Chancellor: 1. John McDonnell is quite the Commons performer. He famously grabbed the mace in the Chamber to express his outrage at the decision to approve a new runway at Heathrow - and was suspended from the Commons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpDyW-p_KWs 2.

Naturally, today is not a good day if you’re a Labour moderate. The Blairites’ troubles have been well publicised, but the old right, or moderate, wing of the party, represented by Labour First, is licking its wounds too. The faction did see Tom Watson elected Deputy Leader (which shows firstly that Watson and Corbyn are not from the same part of the party at all, and secondly that ‘moderate’ is quite a wide term), but it tried to encourage members to fight Corbyn every way they could, particularly by blocking him using second and third preferences. Labour First is now trying to stop the Corbynites taking control of the policymaking process in the party.

A number of backroom staff in the Labour party have been in touch today to say goodbye ahead of an exodus of frontbenchers and staffers who disagree with Jeremy Corbyn. Most expect him to win the leadership contest, and know that their bosses won’t serve in his Shadow Cabinet, or suspect that they will struggle to last very long in an HQ under his leadership. The Sun reports a clear-out in the whips office. Corbyn himself has been very careful to talk about the party coming back together, and has denied that he will bring back mandatory reselection of Labour MPs: something the Left deployed in the 1980s to threaten and remove those on the right of the party. But he doesn’t need to introduce any official reselection: this will happen anyway.

The next project for eurosceptic Tory MPs is to get a free vote for government ministers on the EU referendum. They want David Cameron to tell his frontbenchers whether or not they can campaign for a different stance to the one he’ll take (even if he wants to give the impression he might advocate leaving or remaining), and they want him to do it at the Tory conference in a few weeks' time. One of the reasons the eurosceptics want this is that it will make it easier for them to add the names of senior ministers to their lists of supporters of leaving the EU, and to do so as early as possible in order to build momentum for their campaign.

It’s official: the Tory leadership contest is well and truly underway. No matter that everyone’s interested in the Labour result this weekend and no matter that David Cameron hasn’t even set a date for his departure. This evening, at a drinks reception in a parliamentary lair, Owen Paterson announced that he would be drawing up a set of robust Tory policies for whoever wants to stand as leader to adopt. Speaking to a group of MPs, peers and hacks, the Tory MP said that his think tank UK 2020 - which he said he set up after ‘I was fired’ by the Prime Minister - would work on a series of challenging policy papers over the next few months, which would provide a platform for a future leadership contender.

Following the government’s first Commons defeat of the new parliament, I understand that ministers are not going to try to reverse the primary legislation that introduces a ‘full fat’ version of the purdah restrictions on what central and local government can publish during the EU referendum campaign. But what the government can do to get its way is to use a statutory instrument to set out certain exemptions from those purdah restrictions. This was what the government amendment to new clause 10 of the legislation will allow: that changes to purdah can be introduced through secondary legislation, which must be approved by MPs. This means ministers can try again at a later date to get their way on the sort of purdah (a skimmed, rather than full fat, version).