Ed miliband

Ed Miliband’s main aim for this year’s Labour conference is to show people what makes him ‘tick’, bringing across his personality to voters. He was rather wooden when he appeared on the Andrew Marr Show this morning, and made it clear that this getting-to-know-you conference won’t be about a personality change, but emphasising his own true character traits. He was keen to suggest that he possesses nerves of steel in standing up to the trade unions, who the Sunday Times reports are trying to flush out remaining bastions of support for Tony Blair within Labour. He said: ‘You can’t say at one and the same time that Len McCluskey is

There’s a great temptation for an opposition leader to give answers praising motherhood and apple pie when taking part in a Q&A with members of the public. Especially when that session marks the start of your party’s conference season and your party has set out very few formal policies so far. But Ed Miliband today, as well as announcing crowd pleasers on energy and pensions, caused a bit of a stir by accepting that a Labour government would not ‘spend another’ £3 billion dismantling the frameworks created by the Government’s Health and Social Care Act. He said: ‘There’s no more important institution that expresses, I think, the real soul of

Ed Miliband tells the Evening Standard today that Labour will give ‘wholehearted’ backing to gay marriage and says that churches and religious bodies should be allowed to conduct these ceremonies. At the same Labour has let it be known to the Standard that the party is ‘highly likely’ to impose a three-line whip on the gay marriage bill, though it can’t say so for certain until it knows the wording. Same as the Lib Dems, then, but unlike the Tories, who are allowing a free vote. As Mr Miliband says, ‘I think whether you’re gay or straight, you should be able to signify your commitment, your love, with the term

Over the past two days, we’ve had polls from four different pollsters, and all of them show big leads for Labour. Yesterday, Populus gave Ed Miliband’s party a 15-point lead — the largest lead the pollster has ever shown for Labour. Today, Ipsos MORI shows Labour ahead by 11 points and TNS BMRB have them up by 12. The latest YouGov tracker gives Labour a nine-point lead, although averaging their polls over the last week makes it more like ten points. The precise margins may be different, but all of these results would — if replicated in a general election — result in a large Labour majority and hand Ed

I see that Labour is now fifteen points ahead in the latest opinion poll, a Populus poll for the Times. While the Tories have dropped four points on the previous month, it still seems to me that the bulk of that Labour lead is rightly disaffected Liberal Democrats: they are down to ten per cent. There was a meticulous Peter Kellner piece in Prospect recently which laid out a desperate scenario for the Lib Dems. It certainly looks as if they will be down to the sorts of numbers of MPs they had when Jo Grimond was their leader, and confined to far flung places where they may well still

Ed Miliband has long made responsible capitalism a primary concern of his leadership, and in today’s Telegraph, the Labour leader has a stab at explaining a little more of what he wants it to look like. He has lately taken to pointing out that his speech to his party’s conference last autumn which so confused people with its talk of predators has come good following scandals such as Libor. MPs in his party hope that he will point this out once again when he gives his conference speech in just a few weeks’ time. But enlarging on this theme now, he tells Charles Moore this: ‘But I believe capitalism is the least

What more does Ed Miliband need to do to be taken seriously as the next Prime Minister of Britain? He has been ahead in the polls since the start of last year, and the bookies favourite for longer. A geek? Maybe, but one who has a personal approval rating higher than David Cameron. A leftie? Certainly, and that’s why the orphaned Lib Dem voters feel so at home with him. But his real secret is that no one has the faintest idea what Labour, if elected, would do. We may well be entering the Age of Ed and the terrifying thing is that no one, not even the party leader

Is the government about to start digitally invading every single aspect of our lives? In this week’s cover feature, Nick Cohen questions exactly what and how the government is trying to achieve with the upcoming snooping bill. Discussing the matter future on our View from 22 podcast, director of the Big Brother Watch campaign group Nick Pickles warns that a heavy handed bill would not only ‘slam the breaks’ on the economy but the beneficiaries may not be who you would expect: ‘We’ve had some quite hysterical editorials saying this is about terrorists and pedophiles but the bill itself says the biggest beneficiary is actually Her Majesty’s Revenues and Customs. We’ve asked

It’s fun isn’t it, all this speculation about a leadership challenge to David Cameron? It was obvious really in the run-up to party conference season. We all needed a new narrative. Last year we enjoyed giving Ed Miliband a good kicking and his ‘anti-business’ conference speech played into the hands of his critics. The infantile booing of Tony Blair’s name by delegates made it look like the party was determined to make itself unelectable. But the reality now – and there are plenty on the left as well as the right who still find this a scary prospect – is that Ed Miliband is the man most likely to be

It was straight back into the old routine at PMQs today. Ed Balls heckled the Prime Minister who shouted back, John Bercow managed to call several of the MPs who irritate the Prime Minister most, and Cameron was, perhaps, slightly ruder to Ed Miliband than he had been intending to be. Miliband’s attack, followed up by several Labour backbenchers, was that no one should believe Cameron’s new initiatives on housing, infrastructure and planning given that the PM’s previous, much heralded initiatives on them have not delivered. The point is debatable. But Cameron responded, as he so often does, with a slew of insults — some clever, some not so. He

Before the last election, I had dinner with a Labour minister who told me her number one fear about the Tories getting in would be seeing David Cameron lap up the Olympic limelight. The Olympics, she feared, would hugely benefit whoever happened to be in power – and that was, she feared, going to be Cameron. She needn’t have worried. The Prime Minister was barely visible during the Games (to his credit, he’s not the type to hog limelight). Boris was Boris. But now the games are over, which party leaders have benefited the most? Oddly, all of them – and Ipsos-Mori polling suggests the number one winner was Ed

The first polling on the Corby and East Northamptonshire by-election is out today and not surprisingly, it suggests that Labour will take the seat by a landslide. The poll commissioned by Lord Ashcroft predicts Corby will fall in line with national polling trends — a collapsed Lib Dem vote, reduced Tory presence and a resurgent Labour: If the by-election result follows this pattern, it will represent a 9 per cent swing to Labour since the 2010 general election. If this were replicated at a national level, it would be enough to sweep Ed Miliband back into Downing Street. The poll also gives some reaction to Louise Mensch’s resignation. Over half

Ed Miliband knows that the Corby by-election is going to be a crucial test for his leadership. If he wins, it will be his first constituency gain since he became leader and serve a nicely timed blow to David Cameron’s autumn relaunch. Expectations are high: Bradford West aside, Miliband has managed to increase Labour’s share of the vote in every by-election held in this parliament so far. If he loses, it will be seen as a bitter blow: voters normally punish the party that caused an unnecessary by-election. With a slim majority of 1,895, the Tory candidate faces an uphill battle to hold the seat. If Labour can’t take Corby when the government is trailing

The biggest winner of the coalition spat over Lords reform and boundaries is, undoubtedly, Ed Miliband. The electoral hill he has to climb to be Prime Minister has just been reduced in size significantly by the fact that the next election is likely to be fought on the existing boundaries. A lead over the Tories of just three per cent would deliver him a majority. In quite a turn-around from last year, Miliband will go to his party conference as the most secure of the three leaders. But Miliband will soon face a problem, albeit a high quality one. At some point in the not too distant future, the media

Yesterday’s economic news reminds us of the need for the Government to continue to focus relentlessly on getting our economy moving – dealing with the debt crisis, boosting bank lending to the real economy, and ensuring sustainable long-term prosperity through radical economic reform. One of the key planks of the Government’s reforms is to make Britain’s tax system more competitive, ensuring that Britain is open for business, that we are a dynamic and an attractive place to invest in and to work in. Cutting corporation tax to the lowest rate in the G7 is one element of this plan. Cutting the top rate of income tax to level the playing

Ed Miliband’s comments in the Independent today were clearly based on the assumption that Nick Clegg will not be around if and when it comes to negotiating a possible Lib-Lab coalition in 2015. Vince Cable has already thrown his fedora into the ring to be the next Liberal Democrat leader, and Miliband backed the calls for a change of chief in his interview today. ‘I would find it difficult to work with him,’ he said, when asked about Clegg. Clegg cannot go from being Deputy Prime Minister in one government to Deputy Prime Minister in the next: it would look ridiculous. A coalition with Labour would also not suit Clegg’s own political