“Want to hear the most ridiculous beginning to a political interview that you’ve possibly ever heard?” So starts a clip from BBC Surrey’s breakfast show featuring an interview with Conservative Cllr Peter Martin, the person in charge of education at Surrey County Council.
By Paul Walter
| Mon 26th September 2011 - 10:15 am
Many years ago I knew Tom Baldwin when he was a cub reporter on my local newspaper. He is now Ed Miliband’s chief communications guru. He’s a smart cookie, so I am surprised that Baldwin and Ed Miliband have decided to use the traditional opportunity for a trumpet fanfare for their conference week (i.e the front page of The Observer) to announce a distinctly underwhelming policy.
“It’s the economy, stupid” – no more so than at a time like this. So why waste your golden chance for a big media blast by returning, dog-like, to the site of your own …
By Stephen Tall
| Sun 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.
By Stephen Tall
| Sat 24th September 2011 - 7:45 pm
Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem members think of various political issues, the Coalition, and the performance of key party figures. Some 550 party members responded, and we’re currently publishing the full results.
Ed Miliband’s leadership gets massive thumbs-down from Lib Dem members
LDV asked: Do you think Ed Miliband is doing well or badly as leader of the Labour party?
By Paul Walter
| Thu 15th September 2011 - 11:24 am
It is interesting how voice quality can make all the difference at Prime Minister’s Questions.
Ed Miliband seems to have swallowed several family packs of Tunes lozenges. His voice sounded unusually clear yesterday, without its normal nasal twang. Combined with a disciplined debating approach, this led to a commanding performance (up to a point – of which more later).
David Cameron, in contrast, was sounding slightly hoarse. Perhaps he over-indulged in Russian hospitality in some shape or form. The problem with being hoarse at PMQs is that you end up shouting to compensate. That makes it worse and, red-faced, you give …
It isn’t often that the members of one party should be worried about a proposed policy from a rival party’s leader collapsing under examination. However, David Elstein’s demolition of Ed Miliband’s proposal to limit ownership of newspapers by circulation should not provide more than a passing smile to Liberal Democrats, for it highlights the difficult of coming up with any meaningful change in the rules over newspaper ownership.
Ed Miliband has proposed a 20% limit on ownership of national newspapers, measured by circulation. As the Sun’s circulation is more than 20% of all national newspaper sales, that would require News International to close The Times and either sell the Sunday Times or reposition it as a non-national newspaper (by ceasing to publish in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, where would-be readers would have to subscribe digitally). Even then the Sun’s circulation would need to be forced down, perhaps by restricting access to newsprint. In all likelihood any such measure would result in the combined circulation of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday rising above 20%, so requiring similar measures to be targeted at them.
Banning a newspaper from appearing in parts of the UK? Making it illegal for a newspaper group to buy ‘too much’ paper? There are just too few newspaper titles with a mass audience for restriction on ownership by circulation to be practical.
About the only thing to emerge during Ed Miliband’s time as Labour Leader so far, which could be called a policy, is the belief that the cuts the coalition are implementing are being delivered “too fast and too deep.”
Essentially Labour are saying they would cut by less and later. The purpose of this article is to discuss the “too fast” part of this argument.
The first six months of the coalition’s time in office saw higher than expected growth and higher than expected inflation. Neither of these were really caused by anything the coalition did in those six months, rather …
Authors of the best accounts of the New Labour years delved deeply into the rival Brownite and Blairite versions of events before coming to their own conclusions. Those who did not frequently ended up with embarrassingly lopsided and inaccurate accounts.
Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre, the authors of Ed: The Milibands and the making of a Labour leader, have avoided making the next generation’s version of the same mistake by talking to both sides of the Miliband family, even returning more than once to the conundrum of when Ed told David he was going to run against him for leader. …
Oh, what a joy to be Leader of the Opposition at times like these!
Prime Minister’s Questions today was certainly one of the most important this year. David Cameron has been in a sort of partial purdah for the last few days, no doubt preparing his answers. What we got was quite a substantial exposition of the response to what I’ll call, for the purposes of brevity, “Murdochgate”.
The exchange between Cameron and Miliband started with a large degree of agreement. Indeed, it was almost as if the PM had pulled the rug from under the Leader of the opposition by …
‘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 …
Credit where it’s due, fair’s fair, and well-played.
As Paul Walter noted here on LDV on Wednesday, Labour leader Ed Miliband is having a good war, sticking up for clear and proper principles — a judge-led public inquiry, referring News International’s BSkyB bid to the Competition Commission, and the public call for the resignation of Rebekah Brooks — that resound well with the public.
By contrast, David Cameron is on the back-foot over the unravelling scandal at News International, compromised both by having hired former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his director of communciations (despite warnings), …
The highest profile issue at Deputy Prime Minister’s questions today was the issue of press phone hacking in the light of the allegations concerning Milly Dowler and the News of the World.
Harriet Harman asked Nick Clegg to back Ed Miliband’s call for a general public inquiry into illegality in the newspaper industry. As someone has said, this is a bit like holding an inquiry into why we get bad weather. In a sign of divisions within Labour, Chris Bryant, in contrast, has called for a more narrow inquiry.
Nick Clegg stopped short of backing an inquiry but, instead, emphasised the importance …
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, described Pope Gregory IX as ‘a Pharisee seated on the chair of pestilence, anointed with the oil of wickedness’. The Pope replied that the Emperor was the forerunner of the Antichrist and the monster of the Apocalypse. (‘The Popes’, by John Julius Norwich, 2011).
Such was political debate in the 13th century, topped up by episodes of unspeakable violence.
At this distance it seems rather laughable that an Emperor and a Prelate (especially one considering himself the Vicar of Christ) should behave like that.
But while burning at the stake is now thankfully behind us, vitriol is not. …
Poor Ed Miliband. The Labour leader would have been hoping public attention today would be focused on his his party’s defence of its Inverclyde stronghold — instead, everyone’s watching his car-crash TV interview in which he reformulates a soundbite repeatedly in order to insert the words ‘negotiating table’ and ‘these strikes are wrong’ into every sentence.
The result? A distinctly odd, unnatural, automated interview which fuels the ‘Awkward Ed’ media meme.
Part of me feels a little sorry for Mr Miliband. Clearly he was under the impression that only one line would be extracted from the interview; not unreasonably he was keen to ensure that it was the line which conveyed his key message rather than the news editor’s. Such is the challenge for all politicians in our ‘say it in 7 seconds’ media culture. But, as Iain Duncan Smith found to his cost as Tory leader when he nervously chuckled his way through a Radio 4 Today Programme interview, it’s these kinds of moments which stand out in the public consciousness.
Anyway, enough analysing: just sit back and enjoy.
A bit of a surprise at Prime MInister’s Questions. I expected Ed Miliband to ask about public sector pensions and the strike tomorrow. It was a bit odd when he asked about the NHS. Cameron later said that Miliband couldn’t fire off questions on the strikes subject “because he is in the pocket of the unions.” He also rather cheaply accused Miliband of fighting shy of Greece “because his plan is to make Britain like Greece.”
Then, Cameron reach his climax with a line which must have been honed over much midnight oil in Downing Street:
It’s been a tough few weeks for Labour leader Ed Miliband, with increasing mutterings internally and in the media with his performance, culminating in this week’s ICM poll showing him to be less popular than Nick Clegg.
On the upside, he’s starting to score points off David Cameron at PMQs, a crucible of irrelevance to actual politics but crucial in shaping personality-obsessed journos’ perceptions. And, with today’s interview in the Guardian, he’s proposed a ‘reform agenda’ to open up the Labour party — in his words, “in order to have a good conversation at party conference, you’ve …
After last week’s Miliband success at Prime Minister’s Questions, this time we started off with Ed Miliband in softly softly mode. He asked about Libya and the service chiefs’ concern about an extended campaign. Displaying a becoming measure of gravitas, he also asked whether the defence review should be revisited in the light of the “Arab Spring” which William Hague has described as more important than 9-11. That’s a good question given that the review didn’t mention Libya, Tunisia or Egypt.
David Cameron said he has been assured by the military grand fromage that we could keep the campaign going as …
Someone must have told Ed Miliband that he shouldn’t flit around, butterfly-like, between subjects at Prime Minister’s Questions. He did that last week and got a caning for it. So this week he was doggedly persistent – monomaniac even – on just one subject. Indeed, just one question. He repeated the same words over and over and over and over again. The impression was that he had gone from the sublime to the ridiculous, but it worked and he ostensibly wrong-footed David Cameron.
Ed Miliband said that the government’s welfare reform plans would make 7,000 cancer sufferers worse off by up …
I only ask, because Unison general secretary Dave Prentis has been criticising Labour for making reasonable comments:
In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, the Unison general secretary suggested the Labour leader can no longer count on his union’s automatic support when he said he still has “a lot to get right” and should abandon the strategy of only issuing “reasonable statements”. (Independent on Sunday)
‘Comrades, we must be unreasonable!’ certainly would be an effective demand – if you wanted to caricature yourself into unpopularity.
Pity poor old Ken Clarke. When your own side are saying you are too old for the job, then you know things are bad. Phillip Hollobone (Con) asked at Prime Ministers’ Questions why magistrates have to retire at 70 years old while the man who appoints them, the Justice Secretary – Clarke, is 71 years old. With friends like that….
Amidst all the concerns which Liberal Democrats have about future electoral prospects, particularly after the local election and AV referendum results, it would be easy to think that everything in the garden is rosy for Labour and Tories who both made substantial gains in the local elections – it is not.
What’s worrying Labour?
For all the spectacular gains which Labour made in the Northern cities and industrial towns – mostly from the Liberal Democrats – in Parliamentary terms this would amount to, at best, less than a handful of MPs. In Liverpool, Hull and Newcastle the Liberal Democrats do not have …
I don’t know if you noticed, but the elections on May 5th weren’t all that good for the Liberal Democrats. There was that business of the referendum defeat too. In much of the country we got an absolute pasting.
Journalists and non-political friends keep coming up to me with pained expressions, asking if I’m all right, speaking to me as if I’ve just suffered a bereavement. I smile back and tell them to get stuffed – I’m used to 2 things as a Liberal this last 25 years 1) losing stuff 2) not giving up!
Channel 4 News has conducted an interesting YouGov poll surveying former and current Lib Dem members about their views on the Coalition. Their political editor Gary Gibbon gives the skinny on his blog:
We have a YouGov poll, taken from 396 Lib Dem members and 118 former members, on the programme tonight. It found that 52% of (396) members sampled thought the coalition wouldn’t run the full five years, though 63% thought it should. The poll suggests 35% think Nick Clegg shouldn’t lead the party into the next election (against 45% saying he should) – worth remembering he only won
Rounding off our trio of post-election views from the other parties (see here and here), we have Compass’s Neal Lawson.
So what now for any progressive alliance? Let’s start with an honest assessment of the hole we are in. Labour is now as divided between pluralist and tribalists as it is between those who think the markets needs come before those of society and those who turned social democracy on it head under New Labour. Labour did OK in the North but badly in the South, it did OK in Wales and atrociously in Scotland. The Greens have …
Liberal Democrats have long known that grassroots campaigns can win a ward, a council or a constituency – but they don’t win national election campaigns. It’s the knowledge that you need both the grassroots campaign and an effective national media and/or advertising campaign that explains why when Chris Rennard was the party’s Chief Executive not only did the Campaigns Department grow hugely in size – but so too did the national press team.
Yet at the heart of the Yes campaign in last week’s AV referendum seems to have been a big mistake: trying to run a grassroots campaign to win …
Jon Ashworth, Labour candidate for the Leicester South by-election (and, as Jonathan Ashworth, Labour leader Ed Miliband’s Head of Party Relations) is not exactly trying hard to back his ex-boss’s attempts to win over the Labour Party to AV. Asked whether or not he backed AV he told a public meeting:
Frankly, I don’t really care – I’ve got more important things to think about.
There are some good and genuine electoral reform campaigners in the Labour Party, but this dismissive comment from someone who – if there had been no by-election – would after all have been Head of …
Recently Ed Miliband’s Labour Party TV broadcast expressed his frustration that the world of politics wasn’t like the real world. Considering that the entire broadcast was along the lines of painting Ed Miliband as an ordinary guy, it got me thinking on the subject of whether we really want our politicians to be ordinary people. It seems common sense that we want the people who represent us, to be like us. I would question this assumption, especially when we look at some of the other requirements we place on them.
The first requirement is obviously that they are knowledgeable about the …
In a piece for Prospect magazine, published today, former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy gives his backing to the coalition government. Though Kennedy didn’t vote in favour of the coalition last May, abstaining instead, he now backs it:
I admit that this coalition wasn’t exactly my preferred option. I’ve always considered myself in the reforming, centre-left tradition, so a centre-right arrangement puts my compass in a spin … But those of us who genuinely wanted to explore other routes—from a rainbow coalition to a minority tory administration— were sunk when figures like David Blunkett and John Reid were so against
Over on his work’s blog, The Voice’s co-editor Mark Pack has been giving seven reasons why he expects the Coalition Government will last the distance. His list includes,
5. The Labour Party is not acting like a party that is seriously trying to get back into power before the next general election. Ed Miliband’s call for a widespread policy review is a sensible move for a party voted out after such a long period in power, but it also is based on an assumption that Labour does not need to have a program for government for a good few years yet.
The Financial Times reports, “A loophole in the schemes used by wealthy earners to transfer pensions overseas was blocked on Wednesday in a move the Treasury said showed its determination to crack down …
Nonconformistradical "The real scandal is not the rates, it is a tax code so complex the wealthy can tiptoe round it while the rest of us can not. "
Indeed
"Shouldn’t “faire...
Tristan Ward The argument about Russia's not being successful in Ukraine is a bit of a red herring. Ukraine has survived (to date) thanks in part to significant financial ...
Geoff Reid More important than William's erudition is his wisdom! It woudn't do us any harm to look at the language used in other European countries when debating tax leve...
Tristan Ward Sorry - here's the Dan Neidle link: https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/06/05/taxing-other-people-uk/...
Tristan Ward I strongly recommend people read this piece from Dan Neidle(*). In brief:
1) there’s strong public support for increasing taxes that other people pay;
2)...
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Has the Chancellor set the tone for a Burnham administration?
"His glamour tarnished, his boorishness came to notice": On being the monarch's second son
Nonconformistradical 
Tristan Ward 
Geoff Reid 