Ed balls

Labour will launch its summer campaign later today. The centre-piece is Ed Miliband’s speech. He will present a ‘big choice’ to the British public, arguing that they cannot afford 5 more years of Conservative rule. Miliband’s argument is simple: the economy is broken, only we can fix it; the NHS is threatened, only we can save it; the Tories represent the few, only we care for the many. You will have heard these mantras many times before; but, this time, the presentation is different. The speech bears the mark of David Axelrod, who is busy ‘reframing’ Ed Miliband as an honest yeoman of the shires rather than a metropolitan oddball. Rafael

PMQs taught us a number of things about Labour and the Conservatives. The first is that while Labour has a bumper economy week underway, it does not feel sufficiently confident to attack the Conservatives on this issue in an aggressive forum like PMQs. This is probably quite sensible, given the attack that Cameron launched towards the end of the session on Ed Balls. Looking very chipper indeed, the PM said: ‘What is my idea of fun? It is not hanging out with the Shadow Chancellor! That is my idea of fun! And so, I feel sorry for the leader of the Opposition because he has to hang out with him

That Ed Miliband is even having to state that he wants to carry on as Labour leader if he loses the general election when his party is ahead in the polls shows what a mess the operation around him is. There are a number of Shadow Cabinet members who seem more interested in what happens after the 2015 election than in their party’s chances in that election. Perhaps this is because they have decided that though their party is ahead now, voters will panic about Miliband as they start to try imagining him as Prime Minister. Better to get your off-the-record briefings in now, and not make too much of

Ed Balls knows how to talk to bankers. Having been Gordon Brown’s right hand man and City Minister under the last government, he is well known in the Square Mile—and far more popular than you might think. Earlier this month, Balls was to be found having lunch at HSBC’s private bank in St James. He was there to address the chairmen of the UK banks. Those present left this private lunch with the distinct impression that Balls was presenting himself as a restraining influence on Ed Miliband, and someone who could protect them from some of the Labour leader’s more radical policies. Balls made clear to the group that he

I see that the Labour party, and Labour’s shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt in particular, are trying to make political capital out of the ‘Trojan Horse’ Islamic schools scandal. I’ll write more about this in the coming week, but for the meantime let me point out what a steaming pile of political opportunism and hypocrisy this all is. Tristram says that Michael Gove ‘chose not to act’ and is guilty of ‘gross negligence’ on Islamic extremism in schools. Let me remind Tristram of a very recent piece of Labour party history. In 2009 it transpired that the Labour government was funding a school-running group called the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation (ISF). At that

Whether or not key ministers whose constituencies are affected by HS2 turn out to vote at today’s second reading of the legislation introducing it, the bill will pass this stage with a big majority thanks to cross-party support. Between 20 and 30 MPs are expected to defy the whip and either vote for a motion declining to give the Bill a second reading, or against the second reading itself. What will be interesting over the next few months is how many concessions critics of the Bill are able to eke out of the government, and whether this buys them off or not. When I spoke to Cheryl Gillan about her

There was much excitement on Tuesday night when Labour’s Pat McFadden, a former business and employment minister, appeared on Newsnight and said: ‘I want to see a Labour Party that takes wealth creation every bit as seriously as its fair distribution. I’m all for justice and fairness in the work place. But you have got to create wealth too.’ Tory spinners set to work. ‘Miliband needs to show that wealth creation matters,’ they said. ‘Even his supporters are critical.’ Tory spinners would say that, wouldn’t they? McFadden was merely one disgruntled voice (and with some form). But the chorus of concern has built over the last 24 hours; encouraged, no doubt,

Labour’s response to the biggest announcement of the Budget, on pensions reform, was never going to be snappy. It would be unfair to expect an Opposition to deliver an immediate response to such a surprising and complex reform. But that’s not to say that the way the party has responded has been exemplary. They were not helped by John McTernan’s Newsnight interview on Wednesday night in which he framed the debate about the pension reforms as being about whether or not governments should trust people to manage their own money. He’s a former party adviser so he doesn’t get the lines to take (which, according to Adam Boulton, were not

If Ed Balls thought he could have done a better job than Ed Miliband at responding to the Budget, today he got his chance. The debate on the measures announced by George Osborne rumbles on in the House of Commons, and Ed Balls gave his speech on it this afternoon. He started by telling the Chamber that this was ‘the Chancellor’s last chance to make decisions and announce measures that will make a real difference before the general election’. Balls claimed that ‘for all [Osborne’s] boasts and complacency, the Budget did nothing to address the central reality that will define his time in office – the fact that for most

Ed Balls has just delivered quite an odd post-Budget briefing. It was odd because he didn’t really want to criticise anything. Of course, when the Chancellor has just unexpectedly announced major reforms to the pensions system, it would be foolish for an opposition to start criticising a reform that it probably doesn’t quite understand. But the furthest the Shadow Chancellor would go was that it was ‘underwhelming’. He said: ‘Overall we thought that was pretty underwhelming: Ed Miliband had written pages of his speech which weren’t used in the end because they referred to things that might be in there but weren’t and, so, you know, he obviously had to

George Osborne and Ed Balls have gone head-to-head in the media – the former in The Sun on Sunday and the latter in The Sunday Mirror. The two also appeared on the Andrew Marr Show. Neither man said anything new, at least not in terms of the grand narrative, which is scarcely surprising because the electoral cycle is at the stage where new ideas do not have time to gestate. This is especially true of the chancellor. Osborne has been under pressure to raise the threshold at which people pay the 40p rate. Osborne made it very clear to Andrew Marr that the government’s tax threshold reforms had benefited 25

Ed Balls has announced today that he’d scrap even the tiny tax break that George Osborne is planning to offer next year, thus drawing another dividing line with the Tories. Cameron’s proposed tax relief is not about promoting marriage, or favouring any lifestyle over another. He wants to make the government more marriage-neutral. That means eroding the bias against marriage, which is one of the most pernicious poverty traps in the British today. When I was writing for the News of the World, I was contacted by a reader who said that he loved his family, but had concluded they’d be (financially) a lot better off without him. He sent the

Like it or not, Question Time is Britain’s most popular forum for political debate. Two million viewers regularly tune in, and Thursday evenings on BBC1 is when and where ordinary people are most likely to encounter a secretary of state or shadow cabinet minister. For politicians, it’s a golden opportunity — a huge audience to which they can sell both themselves and their party’s policies. The choice of guests usually causes an uproar on Twitter — mostly along the lines of ‘why is X appearing again? ‘ and ‘ I’m sick of seeing Y party getting so much airtime’ — but who actually appears most frequently? Digging into to the IMDB’s