From today’s Financial Times:

When Brendan Barber, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, made a plea for Labour to discover a new vision and strategy last month it appeared to mark a watershed in heightened tensions between the party and the unions.

Mr Barber, the figurehead of the union movement, is well-known as a party loyalist who rarely speaks out of turn…

Derek Simpson, joint head of Unite, is another voice in the union movement now ramping up the pressure by demanding a clear sense of purpose from the Labour leadership.

There is agreement across the ideological spectrum within Labour that the

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The Independent has a Q+A with Nick Clegg today. The questions (and hence the answers) get more interesting the further through the piece you get, and they cover a very wide range of topics including Nick’s attitude to tax, what to do if offered PR in return for a coalition, the importance (or not) of Iraq, and much more.

Oh dear. Not really the best of starts to the Henley Conservative campaign. First there was David Cameron having to tell the local party what to do regarding selections after the pleas of John Maples were rebuffed. Then the BBC reported how the local Conservative Party was split over their Henley selection.

And now: Conservative Shadow Business Secretary Alan Duncan has contradicated what the Conservatives are telling people locally.

You see, one of their local messages is, “Local Conservatives have called for Gordon Brown to perform another Budget U-turn, by ditching his planned road tax increases” (source: Henley Conservatives website), but …

There’s some interesting online discussion from Labour perspectives about how they got their relatively good local election results in Oxford this May. Not all of the points really stand up to close scrutiny (e.g. Nick Clegg has repeatedly talked about childcare issues, as for example here) but some interesting food for thought nonetheless.

I missed this story before May’s local elections, but it is not exactly every day that someone gets accused by both a radio station and a local newspaper of making up quotes from them. The person in question is Labour Councillor Alan Graves from Derby. This is what the media have had to say about Alan Graves:

2,000 leaflets are to be reprinted because they include a made-up quote from a Ram FM journalist (Ram FM)

and

A Labour councillor is reprinting leaflets which contained comments purporting to be from an Evening Telegraph reporter.

Councillor Alan Graves, a candidate in the May 1

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As David Laws and his team have spotted:

In 2005, Ruth Kelly promised to ensure that at least 50p would be spent on healthy ingredients in primary schools, and 60p in secondary schools, but current Schools Minister, Kevin Brennan has since denied that such a minimum spend exists.

David Laws commented:

Ministers seem to have quietly dropped their commitment to a minimum basic level of funding for school meals.  With food prices surging, this is going to mean a massive squeeze on the quality of meal which schools can afford.

The Government made that promise in 2005, before the huge increases we

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From today’s Times:

Thousands of middle managers in local councils are being authorised to spy on people suspected of petty offences using powers designed to prevent crime and terrorism.

Even junior council officials are being allowed to initiate surveillance operations in what privacy campaigners likened to Eastern bloc police tactics.

The Home Office is expected to be urged by the Commons Home Affairs select committee to issue guidelines to councils on the type of operations in which surveillance can be used.

Amid increasing concern in Parliament that the UK is slowly becoming a surveillance society, the committee has looked at the operation of

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Earlier tonight, John Howell was selected by the Conservatives to be their candidate in the Henley by-election. His selection has been welcomed by Stephen Kearney from the Liberal Democrats, who has already been hard at work on the Henley by-election campaign trail for several weeks:

After a difficult selection process , the Conservatives have settled on County Councillor John Howell as their candidate in the forthcoming by-election.

The Liberal Democrats have welcomed the news of the selection of John Howell. Liberal Democrat candidate and charity boss Stephen Kearney said: “I am looking forward

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Following on from the news about the internal ructions in Henley Conservatives over their selection of their Henley Parliamentary by-election candidate (requiring first John Maples and then David Cameron to meet personally with the local party to order them to fall into line), we now this rather bizarre report in today’s Henley Standard:

An air of secrecy has surrounded the selection meeting so far with no one prepared to admit that it is even taking place.

Well, that’s one way of doing things 🙂

Labour minister Tony McNulty has been telling the world today how Labour is serious about seeking cross-party consensus on detention without trial, saying (to use the words the BBC reported) that “This is too serious to leave to partisan politics”.

Sounds reasonable doesn’t it? One slight problem. We know from a leaked email I blogged about last year that this isn’t Gordon Brown’s view. That email – laying out Labour’s key messages for attacking the Liberal Democrats in the next general election – clearly told Labour Party activists to use the detention without trial issue to attack the Liberal Democrats. …

I’ve always been slightly sceptical about the financial difficulties that the Labour Party is in, in that whilst they might result in Labour having to make big spending cuts I find it hard to believe that when push comes to show the trade unions would really let Labour go under financially (as opposed to playing hardball right until the last moment in order to extract concessions on policy and organisational influence).

It looks as if Labour is doing its very best to put my belief to the test for today’s Guardian reports:

The party has five weeks to find £7.45m to pay off loans to banks and wealthy donors recruited by Lord Levy, Tony Blair’s former chief fundraiser, or become insolvent. A further £6.2m will have to be repaid by Christmas – making £13.65m in all. The sum amounts to two-thirds of the party’s annual income from donations.

The figures are a conservative estimate as they do not include interest that will also have to be paid. A Labour source said that although the total debt was listed as £17.8m on the Electoral Commission website, the true level, with interest, was nearer to £24m.

The possibility that party officials and members of its national executive committee could become liable is being taken seriously by union leaders, and has been underlined by the decision of equity fund chairman David Pitt-Watson not to accept the post as Labour’s general secretary.

Nick Clegg has a piece in today’s Telegraph in which he writes:

The fuel protests hammer home a clear message. After the 10p tax rebellion, the local elections, and the Crewe by-election, no one can doubt the mood of the country any more. There is insurrection in the air. The British people are ready for change and they don’t believe Labour can deliver it.

So the next big question is: what kind of change do people want? And which opposition party can make it happen?

The Conservatives have painted an image of a brave new world, where the sun shines

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