Tag Archives: labour conference

Welcome to my day: 23 September – so much for the first hundred days…

What a difference a week makes. From the almost unbridled joy of a Liberal Democrat Conference where we celebrated a huge infusion of new MPs and a sense that, after more than a decade of pain and struggle to be seen as relevant, we’re bystanders at a Labour Conference where, rather than celebrated a glorious victory, there’s a sense of defensiveness already.

Caron has already covered the rather bizarre mess that Keir Starmer has gotten into over the £100,000 worth of gifts that he has received and declared in recent years. And I entirely understand that there is a perceived political advantage to getting the bad news out of the way early – most keen observers of the last year of the Sunak administration will have already concluded that the sheer scale of unfunded commitments they made would make the task of an incoming administration a difficult one.

But instead of one hundred days of action, it all gives an impression of a leadership rather spinning their wheels even if they are, in reality, possibly doing quite a lot. The media won’t help that – their unfriendliness towards a Labour government can be taken as read. We’ll see if they can do something about changing the narrative over the next couple of days…

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 6 Comments

Ed Miliband’s speech: 5 thoughts on what it means for Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and the 2015 election

Ed MilibandI listened to, rather than watched, Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference yesterday. On the up-side that meant I missed the three hammy mid-speech standing ovations (shades of IDS c.2003); on the down-side it accentuated the peculiar whooping of some of the more excitable delegates (calm down, it’s just a politician talking). In its own terms — getting noticed for its content rather than simply as an impressive no-notes memory feat — it was an undoubted success. Matthew Parris in The Times rather brilliantly captures the flavour:

Crikey

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

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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John Leech MP: The door is not shut on Labour

Manchester Withington MP John Leech is due to speak at a Fabian Society fringe event at the Labour Party conference on Monday.

Titled “Is the Lib/Lab coalition Gone Forever?”, the event will also feature former Lib Dem MP Evan Harris, Labour Mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone and former Labour cabinet minister David Blunkett.

According to the Press Association, John Leech has said,

The door is not shut on the Liberal Democrat and Labour parties working together.

Labour need to re-think the mistakes they made over the last 13 years and get out of this immature opposition mentality that they appear to be so

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