Tag Archives: ed miliband

Mark Pack

The Saturday debate: Time to let the public vote in party elections?

By Mark Pack | Sat 4th December 2010 - 8:56 am

Here’s your starter for ten in our Saturday slot where we throw up an idea or thought for debate…

With the news that Ed Miliband wants to give the public a share of the votes in future Labour leadership elections, and with the Conservative Party already having run several open primaries in which the public could vote for Parliamentary candidates, the Liberal Democrats are currently the only one of the three main parties looking to keep such party elections in the hands of party members only.

Should the Liberal Democrats stick to that position or should the rules for leader and/or …

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Paul Walter

PMQs: Moustaches, strawberries and anoraks

By Paul Walter | Thu 25th November 2010 - 10:49 pm

There were signs this week that Prime Minister’s Questions was getting serious and considered at long last.

Ed Miliband asked a very anorakky question about the government taking away “all the funding from the highly successful school sport partnerships”

There followed an almost scholarly exchange of statistics which left me none the wiser. Miliband’s stats said Labour improved school sports. Cameron’s said they ruined it. Was Miliband right? Was Cameron right? It was beyond me. Except I did notice that Cameron seemed to be almost exclusively quoting figures on “competitive sports”. Ah. The old Tory Daily Mail rant. “Schools don’t do races …

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Mark Pack

Just how bizarre will the Brown / Blair revelations get?

By Mark Pack | Fri 29th October 2010 - 12:55 pm

The more that comes out about how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown behaved (or perhaps more accurately, how Gordon Brown behaved towards Tony Blair) the more you wonder quite what world they were living in. Here, courtesy of The Guardian’s Nicholas Watt, is one of the latest revelations of the sort of behaviour that would get most people the sack but didn’t stop Gordon Brown getting the Premiership:

During tense negotiations over Britain’s EU budget rebate in 2005, the former prime minister became so exasperated with the Treasury that he kidnapped its man in Brussels.

Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of

…

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Paul Walter

PMQs: Bob Russell teaches Ed Miliband how to do it

By Paul Walter | Wed 27th October 2010 - 6:02 pm

These days, Ed Miliband is getting a lot of advice on how to deal with Prime Minister’s Questions. A leaked memo advised him to “get to your feet looking as though you are seizing on something new”, and to ensure that he has a “cheer line” so his speech can be “clipped by the broadcasters”.

David Cameron, of course, reminded Ed Miliband of this advice today. But the best advice came in the form of an example of excellent questioning by Bob Russell, Liberal Democrat MP for Colchester.

In the last question today, Bob referred to the “fun and games” that …

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Oranjepan

Opinion: the IFS, the buts and the maybes – questions of fairness and the CSR

By Oranjepan | Wed 27th October 2010 - 10:25 am

Last week Nick Clegg and the Institute of Fiscal studies squared up over the issue of whether the cuts proposed in the Comprehensive Spending Review are fair.

It is a debate which strikes at the heart of Lib Dems in the coalition government and it will determine the shape of politics in this country for next decade.

For the first time ever the Treasury included an impact analysis of the announced changes within the CSR, the effect of pressure from Lib Dems. These were calculated according to the sections of society that will bear the burden of the changes (ie how …

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Paul Walter

PMQs: Ed Miliband finally grows out of Pampers

By Paul Walter | Wed 13th October 2010 - 11:37 pm

Ed Miliband made a reasonably good start at Prime Minister’s questions today. However, ultimately he failed to score a substantive point against David Cameron. Indeed, Ed Miliband painted himself into a corner. He is now basically defending the retention of child benefit for the top 15% earners in the country. Since Osborne’s breakfast announcement of the child benefit changes, up until now, Labour have avoided this stance.

Miliband started his questioning today focusing on the unfairness for families with one earner over £43K losing child benefit against families with two earners of £40K keeping their child benefit. However, he lost this …

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Posted in PMQs | Also tagged | 50 Comments
Stephen Tall

Ed Miliband’s home affairs appointments: can we really take him seriously on civil liberties?

By Stephen Tall | Mon 11th October 2010 - 8:15 pm

One of the more cheering bits of Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference was his pledge that the party under his leadership would once again take seriously the issue of civil liberties, of individual rights

My generation recognises too that government can itself become a vested interest when it comes to civil liberties. I believe in a society where individual freedom and liberty matter and should never be given away lightly. … we must always remember that British liberties were hard fought and hard won over hundreds of years. We should always take the greatest care in protecting them.

…

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Richard Morris

Opinion: Ed wants to steal our clothes

By Richard Morris | Fri 8th October 2010 - 11:20 am

Oh dear. Ed Miliband makes one speech in which he mentions Beveridge and doesn’t overtly attack us, and everyone thinks he’s making overtures to us and looking to form a Progressive Coalition after the next General Election.

Martin Kettle even wrote a short piece on this in The Guardian.

Wake up everyone. The complete opposite is true. When Ed Miliband said he wanted ‘to eliminate the Liberal Democrats from British Politics’, he meant it. And he’s going about it in an ingenious – and invidious – way.
Partly of course he’s playing the old card of the other two parties – …

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Posted in Op-eds | 40 Comments
Mark Pack

Lords reform: 100 years in the making, another 50 to go?

By Mark Pack | Wed 6th October 2010 - 9:27 am

One of the major achievements in the Coalition Agreement is the commitment of the Conservatives to support not merely a “wholly or mainly” elected Upper House but also one elected by proportional representation no less.

The timetable has started to slip, from the original agreement’s decision to “come forward with a draft motions by December 2010” to talk about draft legislation in January and then, slipped in near the end of Nick Clegg’s conference speech, the intention that the first elections will not be held until the latest possible moment while still keeping the commitment to act in this Parliament – …

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Hamish Renton

Opinion: return to your trattoria and prepare for tagliatelle

By Hamish Renton | Sun 3rd October 2010 - 11:41 am

Well, it’s been quite a week. We know Clegg called Ed Miliband to congratulate him on his victory at the weekend. Quite right too. Ed then strolled around telling everyone how he and David Miliband were, to quote Mark Knopfler, “Brothers in arms”.

Ed then unveiled his road to Damascus moment – on civil liberties, Iraq, banks, AV and justice reform. Spot on, Ed. His keynote speech said cuts were bad in general, but some were needed. But not which ones.

Or when. He implied he now thought the Lib Dems not quite as bad as when he campaigned for …

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Mark Pack

Ed Miliband, unions and money

By Mark Pack | Fri 1st October 2010 - 1:13 pm

A quick aggregation of the declared donations to the Ed Miliband for Leader campaign (so far – I’d expect some donations in the last stages of the campaign still to appear):

£133,000 from trade unions (43% of the total)
£80,951 from other large donors (i.e. over £1,500) (26%)
£95,000 from small donors (31%)
£308,951 in total

Source: donations declared on the Ed Miliband website.

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Matt Gallagher

Opinion: Labour’s new coat of gloss

By Matt Gallagher | Thu 30th September 2010 - 2:59 pm

So, Labour has a new leader, and as he enjoys his honeymoon the party is experiencing a surge in the polls. This is to be expected; indeed, it would be an odd thing if Labour slumped in popularity in the immediate aftermath of such an event. They experienced the same effect following the elections of Blair and Brown, and a fine thing it can be for energising the activists and uniting the party. It can also be an effective way of repackaging a failing brand. Changing the leader gives the impression that the past is now ancient history and the …

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Stephen Tall

What would you do if you were David Miliband?

By Stephen Tall | Wed 29th September 2010 - 10:38 am

Let’s leave to one side, at least for the purposes of this post, David Miliband’s record as foreign secretary in the last Labour government. It would take a heart of stone not to feel sympathy for him over the events of the last week.

To lose the Labour leadership for which he fought long and hard is a tough thing. To lose it by a wafer-thin majority having won over, pretty convincingly, majorities of the party’s membership and his parliamentary colleagues is a tough thing. To lose it to his younger brother is a tough thing. To lose it and know …

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Stephen Tall

Ed Miliband’s new-found opposition to the Iraq war: what his voting record shows

By Stephen Tall | Wed 29th September 2010 - 9:27 am

Ed Miliband was not an MP in 2003, when Labour and Conservative MPs voted en masse to approve the British invasion of Iraq: so we do not know how he would have voted if he had had the opportunity.

The Ed-supporting New Statesman has been keen to promote his anti-Iraq war credentials — see for example their third-hand hearsay evidence here — but there appears to be nothing on the public record to back up his claim.

We are left, therefore, with Ed Miliband’s voting record in the one full Parliament in which he has served. Take a look at the new Labour leader’s voting record in the House of Commons, as recorded by PublicWhip.org.

As you can see, Mr E. Miliband has a proud 0% voting record on the issue of ‘Iraq Investigation – Necessary’. There were 10 separate votes in the House of Commons in the period in which he has been an MP: in not a single one of these did Mr E. Miliband take the opportunity to make clear, or even hint at, what he now so sincerely believes: that the Iraq war was wrong.

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Stephen Tall

Ed Miliband’s leader’s speech: my first impressions

By Stephen Tall | Tue 28th September 2010 - 4:20 pm

Well, that’s one job done: the new Labour leader (but not the New Labour leader: absolutely not) has got through his first, major task: to deliver his speech to the party conference. It seemed to me to best understood as a ‘detoxifying’ speech. Just as David Cameron’s biggest achievement as Tory leader was to make it almost respectable to vote for his party, so was Ed Miliband attempting to cast off the most illiberal and unpopular aspects of the last Labour government (even though he was a member of its cabinet).

Perhaps inevitably this meant the focus of the speech was …

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Iain Roberts

Mail on Sunday’s shocking Ed Miliband revelations

By Iain Roberts | Sun 26th September 2010 - 8:45 am

Ed Miliband has a big job ahead of him, to bring the Labour Party back to power following their second worst general election result since the second world war.

I wish him well and congratulate him on his victory. Whatever concerns people may have about the way he came second among both MPs and party members, he’s won fair and square by the rules the Labour Party set for the contest.

Personally, I would have problems being in a party that thought that particular setup was a fair and democratic way to run elections, but I’m not in that party and …

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 44 Comments
Stephen Tall

First thoughts on Ed Miliband’s election as Labour leader

By Stephen Tall | Sat 25th September 2010 - 7:35 pm

Here are some first thoughts on what Ed Miliband’s wafer-thin election victory in the contest to lead Labour might mean…

1. He’s going to have to work hard to prove he’s his own man. There’s no doubt the right-wing press and the Conservatives will do all they can to show Ed Miliband is little more than a puppet of the unions, given he won Labour’s electoral college thanks to the votes of trade unionists, having lost the vote among party members and MPs/MEPs. The pressure will be on for him to show he can stand up to union power or risk …

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Stephen Tall

Three key issues facing the new Labour leader, Mr Miliband

By Stephen Tall | Sat 25th September 2010 - 3:35 pm

In an hour’s time we shall know who is the new leader of the Labour party. Though the bookies now make Ed Miliband favourite, my hunch is that older brother David will get the nod, just. We shall soon see. The best guide I’ve read on what to look out for as the votes are announced is over at Next Left; Adam Boulton’s blog also has a good guide to the nuts and bolts of what happens when.

But whichever of the Milibands wins through, here are three issues they will need urgently to address heading into the party’s …

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Stephen Tall

LDV survey: Lib Dem members think Mili-D would make best Labour leader (but Balls would be best for us)

By Stephen Tall | Thu 23rd September 2010 - 7:45 am

Lib Dem Voice has polled our members-only forum to discover what Lib Dem members think of the early race for the party presidency, the London mayoral selection, Trident, and the Labour leadership. Over 400 party members have responded, and we’ve been publishing the full results.

This Saturday we find out who will be the next Labour leader. The assumption is it will be neck-and-neck between the Brothers Miliband, David and Ed. David has been the favourite throughout the summer-long contest, but in the last few weeks theres been a sense that the race has tightened with many folk now tipping …

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Mark Pack

Just how daft does David Miliband think Liberal Democrats are?

By Mark Pack | Fri 17th September 2010 - 12:56 pm

Today’s Guardian is reporting that David Miliband,

… would like to persuade Nick Clegg to pull out of plans for a referendum on the alternative vote next May.

Instead, Miliband wants the Liberal Democrat leader to consider his proposal of a joint referendum on the House of Commons voting system and an elected House of Lords on the same day – something Miliband has called a democracy day.

Pause for a moment to recall that the Conservatives have agreed to introduce elections for the House of Lords, and by Proportional Representation no less.

So David Miliband’s offer …

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Stephen Tall

Who would get your vote in the Labour leadership contest?

By Stephen Tall | Mon 13th September 2010 - 7:45 am

The weekend papers were full of speculation about the Labour leadership contest, which as it draws to a close appears to be a nail-bitingly close finish between the Brothers Miliband.

According to pollster YouGov, Ed Miliband is set to sneak victory by the closest of margins after second preferences are taken into account; though the poll didn’t appear to take into account the votes of MPs and MEPs who control one-third of Labour’s electoral college. This is not, after all, a party which believes all votes should be equal, whether in Parliamentary constituencies or in their own leadership race.

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Stephen Tall

Everybody loves us Lib Dems

By Stephen Tall | Sat 11th September 2010 - 5:35 pm

I blame the Tories. Ever since David Cameron became their leader, he’s been determined to ‘love-bomb’ the Lib Dems. Love-bombing is the ingenious tactic by which other parties claim to believe in enough Lib Dem policies without, y’know, actually being Lib Dems.

Labour leadership hopeful Ed Miliband was at it last month. Then earlier this week the Greens’ Caroline Lucas made her pitch.

And now it’s the turn of the continuing Liberal Party:

We appreciate over the last few weeks many LibDem Councillors and members have become increasingly uneasy about the coalition government.

The fact that LibDem MP’s will be

…

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Stephen Tall

Dave reckons Mili-D’s the biggest threat: for the record, so do I

By Stephen Tall | Sat 28th August 2010 - 3:04 pm

David Cameron has ‘let it be known’ (ie, his press team briefed the Guardian) that shadow foreign secretary David Miliband “poses the greatest threat to the Conservative party of all the candidates in the Labour leadership contest”.

How to interpret this? Is Dave’s backing of David a cunning bluff: the Tory leader backing the most New Labour-identified candidate to put Labour members off backing him? Or could it be an even cunninger double bluff: the Tory leader, knowing his endorsement could be read as a bluff, backing the most media-awkward candidate in the hope Labour members will vote for …

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Stephen Tall

Kennedy defection rumours – another reason journalists are losing the public’s trust

By Stephen Tall | Sun 22nd August 2010 - 2:28 pm

So today, at last, the news media is finally reporting the pretty unsurprising news that Charles Kennedy, leader of the Lib Dems from 1999 to 2006, is not leaving the Lib Dems in 2010.

Now it is of course the silly season, and we can easily write off this journalistic confection as mere desperation to fill some column inches / dead air-time. But actually I think it’s a symptom of a wider malaise in political journalism, its ‘tabloidisation’.

How an unsourced rumour went viral

Let’s go back to Friday afternoon, when the Kennedy defection rumours started circulating, and work out how …

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Iain Roberts

Charles Kennedy: I’ll go to my grave with my Lib Dem membership card in my pocket

By Iain Roberts | Sun 22nd August 2010 - 7:25 am

Charles Kennedy has set the record straight over rumours of his defection which kept the political tweeters and bloggers buzzing yesterday whilst everyone else sensibly got on with their Saturday. As Scotland on Sunday reports, he made the comments after a meeting with constituents in Dingwall.

It is absolute rubbish, I am not joining the Labour Party and have not had any discussions about it with anyone from the Labour Party.

I will go out of this world feet first with my Lib Dem membership card in my pocket.

Ed Miliband has also agreed that no talks have …

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Stephen Tall

Vince Cable set to propose graduate tax to replace tuition fees

By Stephen Tall | Wed 14th July 2010 - 8:05 pm

The BBC reports:

A graduate tax is to be proposed by the Business Secretary Vince Cable, in a keynote speech on the future funding of higher education. This would mean students in England would repay the costs of going to university through taxation once t hey began working. A review of tuition fees and student finance is due to report in the autumn.

Mr Cable, who has pledged to oppose raising fees, will suggest a graduate tax as an alternative system. This would mean students’ fees being paid by the government to universities – and graduates would then pay a higher

…

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Daniel Furr

Opinion: John Prescott and the unions, voices of Labour’s rapid decline

By Daniel Furr | Sun 11th July 2010 - 9:20 am

Labour is not taking to opposition very well. Partisan points of orders, revisionist attitudes to the fiscal situation and demanding the coalition praises their formers leaders. And now we see Labour figures demanding voters to see a referendum, on the principle of a fairer voting system, as a “confidence vote on the coalition.”

By asking the public for their ideas and recommendations for public sector cuts, the Coalition Government has intelligently put the Labour party in an uncomfortable place. The unions are threatening general strikes and the average voter recognises the ideological and partisan attitude of the union movement. The “union …

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Mark Pack

The easy, progressive way to cut £44 billion without harming worthwhile public services or the least well off

By Mark Pack | Fri 18th June 2010 - 9:50 am

It may sound a challenge, cutting £44 billion from public spending.

But actually, it’s easy.

Not only that, it can be done without hitting the least well off. Without cutting worthwhile public services. And if you’re so minded, you can even drape a “progressive” label over it all.

How to do it?

Simple.

You see, the last Labour Budget contained overall spending totals for the government that mean a cut in spending of £44 billion (using the calculations form the Office of Budget Responsibility). Now, because Labour didn’t publish any departmental spending total plans beyond the current financial year, we don’t know where those £44

…

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James Blessing

Opinion: Who do we want to win the Labour leadership election?

By James Blessing | Sun 13th June 2010 - 11:20 am

It’s been interesting to see the final list of nominations for Labour Party leader which, for those that missed it, is:

Diane Abbott
Ed Balls
Andy Burnham
David Miliband
Ed Miliband

The response from all quarters about the list first that its very ‘samey’, with much said about tokenism and the inclusion of Diane Abbott, not because she’s black or a woman but because she represents the old left of the party. That got me to thinking about who would be the best from a Lib Dem point of view.

A Leftie

Dianne Abbott is the only real left leaning candidate. A Labour party under her ministrations would …

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Stephen Tall

Want to know who the most liberal Labour leadership contender is?

By Stephen Tall | Thu 10th June 2010 - 9:40 am

Before the election, Lib Dem Voice launched How Authoritarian is your MP?, a website which ranked how authoritarian – or liberal – were MPs in the 2005-10 parliament based on their voting record on 10 key issues. These ranged from ID cards to detention without trial to freedom of speech.

The five candidates for the Labour leadership are now official – so we can now see how their voting record compares, and name the contender who is, officially, the most liberal potential Labour leader …

(NB: if you click on their name you can see how their voting record stacks up).

1. Diane Abbott.

36% authoritarian, 64% liberal.

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