Tag Archives: labour party

Ed Balls: My starting point is we are going to have keep all the cuts

By Mark Pack | Published 13th January 2012 - 11:23 pm

Saturday’s Guardian has an interview with Ed Balls:

Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, has moved to challenge accusations that Labour is not credible on the economy by telling the public sector unions that he endorses George Osborne’s public sector pay freeze until the end of the parliament, and that he accepts every spending cut…

“My starting point is, I am afraid, we are going to have keep all these cuts. There is a big squeeze happening on budgets across the piece. The squeeze on defence spending, for instance, is

…

Posted in News | Also tagged ed balls | 31 Comments

Ian Swales MP writes: 12 CUTS Labour don’t talk about

By Ian Swales MP | Published 30th December 2011 - 12:30 pm

The Labour party think they can win the economic argument by just wailing about cuts on behalf of their public sector union paymasters. They give no credible alternatives for what they would do about Britain’s economic crisis.

What they also like to ignore is some of the changes that are being made towards making this country fairer. Here is a list of cuts WE should be talking about because they are mostly happening through Lib Dem action and pressure.

The CUT from £250,000 to £50,000 in the maximum annual pension contribution to receive tax relief – clawing back a staggering £4,000,000,000 (£4bn) that Labour was giving to the rich.
The

…

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged pupil premium, regional growth fund, spending cuts, tax cuts (Lib Dem), triple lock | 55 Comments

Labour’s rapidly warming official attitude towards the Liberal Democrats

By Mark Pack | Published 14th December 2011 - 7:50 am

Over on the Spectator website, Peter Hoskin neatly summarises the latest warming in the Labour Party’s official attitude towards the Liberal Democrats:

Remember when MiliE described them as a ‘disgrace to the traditions of liberalism’? Since then he has said that, actually, he’d work with the Lib Dems so long as they ditched Clegg; that he’d work with them even if they kept Clegg; that … oh, you get the picture. And now this [a piece by Douglas Alexander]: the closest that Labour have come, in spirit at least, to matching the ‘big, open, comprehensive offer’ that Cameron

…

Posted in News | Also tagged douglas alexander, ed miliband, nick clegg, peter hoskin | 19 Comments

The Independent View: Labour is a puppet of the unions – Lib Dems must stand up for non-unionised workers

By Henry Gruijters | Published 3rd November 2011 - 10:45 am

As a member of the Dutch liberal party the VVD who was studying in the UK during the last election, I was pleased that the Lib Dems formed a coalition with the Conservatives. Yet I feel that a strategy that distinguishes the party from Labour is just as important as one that distinguishes the Lib Dems from the Tories.

Instead of stressing coalition differences, the Lib Dems have the opportunity to show that they are a true alternative to Labour. The Lib Dems should stress that, unlike Labour, they protect ordinary workers by deregulating the labour market, and do not …

Posted in The Independent View | Also tagged donations, employment law, netherlands, trade unions | 95 Comments

Opinion: Reassessing New Labour

By Ed Maxfield | Published 31st October 2011 - 3:54 pm

It is worth buying Reassessing New Labour just to read James Purnell’s short preface. New Labour’s would-be philosopher king pretty much disappeared from view after Labour chose the wrong Miliband as leader. Purnell’s piece highlights perfectly the challenge Labour faces in coming to terms with its 2010 election defeat. It is brilliantly lucid in assessing why Labour lost. It is extremely limited in its analysis of how to recover. In particular it completely ignores the 500lb gorilla in the corner – the economy. I’ll come back to this in a moment.

Diamond and Kenny’s book brings together a range of contributions …

Posted in Books, Op-eds | Also tagged james purnell, maurice glasman, michael kenny, new labour, patrick diamond | 4 Comments

Labour’s odd messaging: how the party was for reversing Coalition cuts before it was against them

By Stephen Tall | Published 27th September 2011 - 9:15 am

Mark Pack has already highlighted the pitfalls of political opponents commentating on other parties’ conferences. And he’s right of course. But it didn’t stop him, so I won’t let it stop me…

I am genuinely puzzled by Labour’s key messages based on the first two days of their conference. Day 1 kicked off with the Big Announcment by Ed Miliband that Labour is now committed to doubling tuition fees (dressed up as only The Observer could as Labour committing to ‘slashing’ fees).

Regardless of what you think about the policy, and I think I’ve made my views clear …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged ed balls, ed miliband, higher education, tuition fees, universities | Leave a comment

Tim Leunig writes: The problem with Labour’s proposed tuition fees cap

By Tim Leunig | Published 27th September 2011 - 7:40 am

Ed Miliband has seized the initiative at the start of his conference, announcing that Labour would cap student fees at £6,000 per year. This policy is superficially attractive, and is clearly designed to win over LibDem supporters who remain angry at the rise in tuition fees.

Today I have published an analysis of Labour’s proposal. It uses the Business Innovation and Skills graduate income “ready reckoner”, which is based on data from the ONS Labour Force Survey. The underlying data are as good as they can be, although of course predicting graduate incomes in 30 years time is a dangerous …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged centre forum, higher education, tuition fees, universities | 15 Comments

Ed Miliband on tuition fees: £6k not £9k. The reaction so far…

By Stephen Tall | Published 25th September 2011 - 11:10 am

Rejoice! Rejoice! Labour has a policy.

Party leader Ed Miliband has vowed that, if Labour were in government now, they would double tuition fees to £6k from the current £3k level set by the last Labour government with immediate effect. In other words, they would undercut the Coalition’s £9k fees by £3k.

Here are some early thoughts:

1) The principle of cutting fees from £9k to £6k

The reality is the cut from £9k to £6k makes no difference to the monthly repayments that poorer students will repay once they’ve graduated and earning more than £21k.

Posted in News | Also tagged ed miliband, higher education, tuition fees, universities | 34 Comments

Labour councillors ordered: don’t speak to journalists

By Mark Pack | Published 14th September 2011 - 7:55 am

Odd news from Liverpool, where Labour council leader Joe Anderson has taken such exception to local media coverage of a leaked document relating to the council’s controversial interim Chief Executive appointment that he,

Has ordered all Labour councillors and council officials, including the press office, not to talk to either newspaper. (Liverpool Echo)

A curious twist is that the leaked document was legal advice from Cherie Blair, which the council claims was subsequently contradicted by further advice given to it by … Cherie Blair. To add to the confusion, local newspapers have pointed out that when they contacted the council about …

Posted in Opposition watch | Also tagged cherie blair, jo anderson, liverpool city council | 3 Comments

In (partial) defence of Labour’s so-called ‘Lay Off Murdoch’ instruction to party’s MPs

By Stephen Tall | Published 10th July 2011 - 5:28 pm

‘Lay off Murdoch’ — that was the ever-so-quotable paraphrase that the New Statesman used to accompany this article by Dan Hodges, revealing how the Labour Party press team had issued a circular ‘to all shadow cabinet teams warns Labour spokespeople to avoid linking hacking with the BSkyB bid, to accept ministerial assurances that meetings with Rupert Murdoch are not influencing that process, and to ensure that complaints about tapping are made in a personal, not shadow ministerial, capacity.’

In reality, Labour’s communications chief Tom Baldwin — yes, himself a former Murdoch employee — did not use the phrase, ‘Lay off …

Posted in News | Also tagged ed miliband, les hinton, media, news international, rebekah brooks, rupert murdoch, tom baldwin | 13 Comments

Opinion: Why Wrexham Labour Party should be ashamed: The curious case of Aled Roberts

By David Hennigan | Published 7th July 2011 - 12:21 pm

It’s estimated that well over 30% of the Welsh population speak Welsh as their first language – that is growing year on year. Hundreds of thousands more across the world speak it – even in a distant corner of Argentina – the valleys of a Patagonia. My partner from Rhosllanerchrugog and her family speak Welsh. They are fiercely proud of their heritage and would be absolutely disgusted with the treatment of Aled Roberts AM. It appears that they don’t speak Welsh at the Electoral Commission!

Now let me declare an interest, I don’t know Aled Roberts, I know his mum …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged aled roberts, electoral commission, john dixon, Wales, wrexham | 21 Comments

Opinion: Why Labour members should defect to the Liberal Democrats

By George Kendall | Published 14th April 2011 - 10:27 am

If you’re Labour, and want to be an MP in a safe seat, switching to the Lib Dems would be a bad move. Perhaps you like authoritarian policies on law and order, and prefer to avoid difficult decisions on the deficit. If so, the Lib Dems isn’t the party for you.

But maybe you think politics isn’t black and white, that there is good and bad in all the parties, and so working together is a good thing. Perhaps you think that the government should do what will work on law and order, rather than pander to the tabloid press, and …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged david miliband, ed balls, nick clegg | 74 Comments

Paul Burstow writes… Labour shouldn’t play party politics with the NHS

By Paul Burstow MP | Published 16th March 2011 - 9:50 pm

On Saturday I gave a guarantee to every party member that I, along with other Liberal Democrat members of the Government would listen to every word that you had to say. I completely stand by that. If there are ways in which we can amend the Health and Social Care Bill then we will work to do it. But what we won’t do is to allow our Spring Conference to be hijacked and used as a political tool by Labour. And that’s exactly what they tried to do today.

Today was one of Labour’s designated days in Parliament when they are …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged emily thornberry, NHS, nhs reform | 61 Comments

Opinion: there are better adjectives for the Labour Party than ‘progressive’

By Richard Morris | Published 7th February 2011 - 3:44 pm

I keep banging on about the fact that there’s a fairly obvious programme in place by the Labour Party to steal our natural positions, both philosophically and in policy (see my article on LDV or my recent blog post). Their latest moves to ‘own’ the term progressive are another case in point.

However, as a branding expert (and a Lib Dem) I do find the news that Ed Miliband is considering rebranding the party he leads as ‘The Progressive Labour Party’ pretty funny – and wrongheaded.

There are essentially three reasons why an organisation rebrands:

Costs savings through economies of scale

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged branding, progressive | 59 Comments

The 100-plus Labour MPs publicly opposing electoral reform

By Stephen Tall | Published 30th December 2010 - 7:45 pm

Poor Ed Miliband. In his first speech to the Labour party conference he tried his valiant best to show that Labour had changed, that it was a party which could re-claim the progressive liberalism it so happily junked in the Blair/Brown years.

No more ID cards, detention without trial, control orders etc — so said Ed. And yes to electoral reform in the shape of the alternative vote — so said Ed.

Unfortunately for Ed, not many of his MPs are listening to him. Today, the No2AV campaign proudly announced that over 100 of Labour’s 257 MPs would be opposing …

Posted in News, Opposition watch | Also tagged alternative vote, av referendum, ed miliband, electoral reform | 57 Comments

Tag Archives: labour party

1) The principle of cutting fees from £9k to £6k

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