Politics Archives

Monday

27 Sep 2010

Miliband hampered by Labour’s ongoing vacuum

Time is against Ed Miliband: there is a void where there should be a new shadow chancellor. The party leadership cannot refine its arguments ahead of next month’s spending review, upon which the immediate success of Miliband’s regime depends. A further problem is that all of Labour’s arguments are made in the past tense. The previous government’s economic record is defended with evangelical fervour; but each speaker is struck dumb when asked about specific future savings and plans. Alistair Darling closed his front-bench career this afternoon by saying, ‘The deficit is the result of the banking crisis – and the economic crisis that followed it. We had to take that

James Forsyth

Where does Miliband go now?

How to reduce the deficit is the ground on which the Tories want to take on Ed Miliband. The whole Tory war machine has been mobilised to try and use today’s IMF report which calls the Osborne deficit reduction plan ‘appropriately ambitious’ to flush out Ed Miliband’s position on the deficit. The deficit is the ground on which Labour would least like to fight right now They know that, in the words of one former Cabinet minister, ‘that his approach to the deficit is what will defined Ed politically.’ But it is hard to make this choice when you don’t know who your shadow Chancellor is and what’s in the

Peter Hoskin

Forcing an apology

Admittedly, this is but an item of marginalia in the notebook of British politics – but I’d appreciate CoffeeHousers’ views on it nonetheless. I’m talking about the Tories’ efforts to squeeze an apology out of Labour for the state of the public finances. This is something that they’ve been trying to do since the election, but the strategy has been reheated in the aftermath of Ed Miliband’s election. As Sayeeda Warsi put it on Saturday, “what I noticed in his acceptance speech was that there was … no apology for the role that he had played in the current economic mess.” Other Tory folk have called for that to be

Alex Massie

The Rise of Newt Labour

Labour’s new leader “does human”. Over-estimating Ed Miliband is the new under-estimating Ed Miliband. That’s why James, Iain Martin, Ben Brogan and, among others, David Skelton all warn against under-estimating Ed Miliband. This is the clever play. If Ed turns out to be a disaster no-one will recall warning that he might be surprisingly effective; should he actually be surprisingly effective then you can look sage and prescient. Nevertheless, people, Ed Miliband is still Ed Miliband. The manner of his victory – no matter how much and how reasonably Hopi Sen manages to dress it up – is still the Union-forged thing it is. When the strikes come – and

Peter Hoskin

The speech that David Miliband would have given on Saturday?

Caveats about positioning after the event, of course, but Andrew Pierce’s account of the speech that David Miliband would have given on Saturday is still worth noting down: “You could have heard a pin drop in the conference hall when the new Labour leader delivered his acceptance speech. Far from being triumphalist, he issued a stark and unwelcome warning that shocked the Party: it had to change, or lose the next election. Only minutes after the applause had died down on Gordon Brown’s valedictory address, his successor savaged Brown’s record as Chancellor and Prime Minister. He mocked the claim that Labour had ended the cycle of boom and bust. He

Fraser Nelson

The penny drops

David Miliband is a tease. The speech he just gave was one of his best: it was self-deprecating, had gravitas, humour, and he spoke down to the Tories, telling William Hague what statesmanship was about. A monstrous conceit, CoffeeHousers may argue, but a Labour leader needs a bit of that; to make out that he’s the real leader-in-waiting, up against lightweights. There was his trademark little bit of grit in the speech: he praised the troops, the Afghan mission and criticised Cameron for reducing British diplomacy to trade missions (Con Coughlin made the same point in a Spectator cover piece recently). My point: that this was a measurably better speech

Peter Hoskin

The defeated brother delivers a winning speech

David Miliband’s address to the Labour conference ended as it began: with a standing ovation. Sentimentality and sympathy, perhaps – but it was also deserved. This was a speech that his younger sibling will be hard pressed to match tomorrow. Indeed, I doubt even MiliD has matched it himself before now It began, of course, with an attempt to massage out the tensions of the past few days. There were some gags about how Miliband had draft speeches for Saturday and Tuesday on his computer – “so I’ve got a couple of speeches to draw on.” And he implored Labour to unite behind his brother – “we have a great

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 27 September 2010

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend Fraser Nelson asks if Ed Miliband will face facts. James Forsyth praises the dignity of David Miliband, and urges the right not to underestimate Ed Miliband. Peter Hoskin examines the Whelan factor, and observes the start of the Ed Miliband de-toxification process. David Blackburn says that the disaster at the Delhi games indicts the Indian state. And Rod Liddle is amazed that some people voted for Diane Abbott.

David Blackburn

Oh brother, where art thou?

All eyes have turned to the future Labour front bench, particularly the identity of George Osborne’s shadow. Ed Balls has made his most obvious pitch yet. In a piece for the Guardian, bluntly titled ‘Now let’s offer a real choice – and nail the Tory lie on cuts’, he writes: ‘Being a united party is not enough. We must also win the argument. If we do not give people a positive reason to vote Labour, rather than just a temporary outlet for their protest, we will not persuade them to stick with us come the election. First, on the economy – of course we will need tough choices to

Sunday

26 Sep 2010

Rod Liddle

So some people actually voted for Abbott?

The difficult question for me is who were the 0.88 per cent of Labour MPs, and 2.5 per cent of Labour members, who thought that Diane Abbott was the best possible person to lead the Labour Party? Admittedly this is the sort of proportion of voters who at elections decide to select the candidate from the Ku Klux Klan, or the Ban Chives Now! candidate or the dribbling bearded loon in a Union Jack costume and with the body of a stuffed ferret protruding from each ear, so designed to make you think it was actually implanted in his skull and who calls himself something from a Monty Python programme

James Forsyth

Why Ed Miliband shouldn’t be underestimated

There is a feeling on the right that with the election of Ed Miliband it is back to the good old days. The thinking goes that Labour have elected a lefty as leader and it is time “to do ‘em over just like we did back in the day”. But this is overly-simplistic. First of all, Ed Miliband is certainly to the left of Tony Blair but he’s nowhere near as far left, compared to the public, as Michael Foot or Tony Benn, or anyone like that. Second, the right in the ‘80s had three fronts on which to attack left-wing politicians: economics, culture and national defence. Now, it only

James Forsyth

Labour’s subdued response to Miliband’s victory

There’s an odd mood in Manchester at the moment. The leadership election result has discombobulated the Labour establishment. In some circles, there is irritation that union votes delivered the leadership to Ed Miliband against the wishes of the MPs and party members. Others worry that this has all come too soon for Ed Miliband, that – in the words of one senior member of the last government – “he still doesn’t know what he thinks”. While others are still getting their heads round the family dynamic. It was striking that when people arrived in the conference hotel bar from the Ed Miliband victory party they were not mobbed. But Ed

Peter Hoskin

Ed Miliband tries to detoxify his brand

The scrubbing job starts in earnest this morning, as Ed Miliband tries to erase that “Red” epithet from before his name. Exhibit A was his appearance on the Andrew Marr show, in which he took every opportunity to cast the manner of his victory in a favourable light. “If you look at this as one vote-one member, then I got more votes than anyone else,” he assured us, before going on to say that he won the union vote because, “I spoke about things that matter to working people in this country.” When asked whether he would sway under pressure from the union leadership, he averred, “I’m nobody’s man, I’m

Saturday

25 Sep 2010

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 25 September 2010

On Monday, I tracked down my father to his hotel in Liverpool. He was there for the Liberal Democrat conference. On Monday, I tracked down my father to his hotel in Liverpool. He was there for the Liberal Democrat conference. He has attended every single one of these since 1953, when he represented the Cambridge University Liberal Club and made a fiery speech about how the Liberals should be more enthusiastic about Europe. So he has spent an entire year of his life at these occasions — surely a record. In the year of his first conference, which was held at Ilfracombe, the party stood at 3 per cent in

James Forsyth

The dignity of David Miliband

We spend a lot of time criticising politicians so it behoves us to praise one when they behave with as much dignity as David Miliband has today. He has lost the Labour leadership election by the narrowest of margins and despite winning among both party members and MPs, but there has not been even a hint of bitterness or irriation in his behaviour. After the result, David addressed his team, telling them to rally around his brother. He told them their job was to ensure that Labour keeps the pressure on the coalition through the comprehensive spending review. Right now, David Miliband is touring the conference hotel, talking to conference

James Forsyth

The aftermath of Labour’s contest

As soon as the first round result popped up the screen, an expert on the Labour electoral college turned to me and said ‘Ed has won’. David was not far enough ahead on first preferences to win. But it was also clear that David was likely to win MPs and members — that Ed was going to win thanks to the union vote. Now, the union vote is no longer a bloc vote. But in terms of legitimacy it is widely perceived to trail the members and MPs sections. The nature of his victory will make Ed Miliband’s task harder over the next few weeks, the Red Ed tag is

Fraser Nelson

Will Ed Miliband face facts?

I knew that David Miliband had lost the moment I saw him walk in the room, smiling like Michael Portillo on election night 1997. And when I saw Ed Balls look of pure murder: his enemy had won. Time to destroy. We saw a tension in this result: the MPs and members leaned towards David, who had a tough message on the deficit, who defended the Iraq war, who basically had an agenda for government. Whereas Ed Miliband’s agenda is for opposition: he’ll be marching alongside the unions the day before Osborne’s spending review. As I say in the News of the World tomorrow, Ed will ooze left wing morals

Peter Hoskin

The unions deliver Ed Miliband to the throne

In the end, it was all quite exciting. After four months of soporific campaigning, after a speech by Gordon Brown, after tribute video upon tribute video, it all came down to an astonishingly tense round of results. And Ed Miliband edged out his brother by just over 1 percentage point overall, 50.6 to 49.4. It may have been the outcome that most punters expected coming into today – but it is not one that many would have predicted, with any confidence, back in May. Looking at the full voting split, a less flattering picture emerges. David Miliband actually won two of the three voting blocks: the MPs turned out 53-47

Peter Hoskin

Ed Miliband elected Labour leader: live blog

1704, PH: We’ll leave it there, although we’ll have more reaction on Coffee House shortly. 1702, PH: I’ve already forgotten Miliband’s final line, although it involved the phrase “new generation”. Not a great speech, but some turnaround for him over the course of the contest. 1700, PH: Ooh, what does that mean for Ed Balls? Miliband says that, “I do believe we’ve got to reduce the deficit, but we’ve got to do more to help the country”. 1700, JF: It is what Labour MPs were calling the Doomsday scenario, Ed loses MPs and Members but wins thanks to massive support in the union section. Tonight there will be those who

James Forsyth

Cameron neglects to mention his tax cut for the middle classes

David Cameron’s interview in the Telegraph this morning is striking for three reasons. First, despite the interview appearing on the day of the Labour leadership declaration, there’s no attempt to bring the hammer down on the new Labour leader. All we get is some framing on the deficit. Next, as Paul Goodman notes, it is an attempt to reassure the Tory faithful after the Lib Dem conference Vince Cable is gently put back in his box with the line ‘Vince is Vince’. Cameron also stresses that he ‘will always safeguard our nuclear deterrent’; a line that is very different from the nakedly political discussions of Trident in Liverpool, where what

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