New labour

Ed Miliband was doing the interview rounds today, and CoffeeHouses may be interested in the below – an edited version of his exchange with Nicky Campbell on Five Live. NC: Is the problem union power?  MPs and the constituencies clearly voted for your brother, Alan Johnson’s favourite candidate.  He was a clear winner in those two parts of the party, and many people say union influence has to be limited.  Now this is a real test of your guts, isn’t it?  Is it the right thing to do? EM: I see it a different way, Nicky, to be honest.  I see that politics as a whole, in every party, is

There is talk of Ed Miliband’s ‘New Generation’, but no indication of what it stands for. It has no clear views on the economy, student finance, defence and electoral reform. Despite his party’s lead in the polls, Ed Miliband is an inert political entity (and it did not help him that the party peaked in his absence). Tim Montgomerie has rightly diagnosed a leadership vacuum. Miliband is timid before a parliamentary party that did not select him, and is struggling to acclimatise to a political discourse that the coalition government is moving beyond the terse liturgy of left and right. So far, Miliband’s banal default tactic has been to seek

Patronage remains a strong statement of leadership, and an indication of a leader’s competence. As James noted yesterday, Ed Miliband chose the occasion to play one of his few picture cards: Maurice Glassman’s accession into red ermine is a major PR coup for Labour in the battle to be ‘progressive’ and community-focused. But Miliband’s list is also noteworthy for those it excluded. The Times has the details (£): ‘He decided against handing seats in the House of Lords to Nigel Doughty and Sir Ronald Cohen — who have given more than £6 million to the party since 2005 — as well as Jon Mendelsohn, Labour’s fundraising chief. All three had

This from Matthew Taylor – the former No.10 head of policy, speaking to the Times for their series (£) on the fall of New Labour – deserves a post of its own: “For me, New Labour died when Tony bought Gordon an ice cream in 2005. I remember sitting in Downing St two days after the election win and chucking into the bin the proposal to break up the Treasury.” 

IDS has played the party politics of welfare reform adeptly. He has built a coalition beyond the government, convinced of the need for urgency and dynamic reform. Even Labour is on side, only criticising when valid and necessary. It has not proposed a comprehensive alternative because it is protecting its record in government – sensing, correctly, that it is vulnerable to its history. Douglas Alexander rallies to New Labour’s defence in the Independent on Sunday. Labour’s record on welfare was not uniformly baleful: Purnell, Hutton and Murphy did important work, on which IDS has drawn. But Alexander overlooks some inconvenient truths. Gordon Brown’s definition of ‘poverty’ was an arbitrary line

At last, The Guardian is reporting the grassroots rebellion in education. It has picked up on the story of Fiona Murphy who blogged on Coffee House yesterday about her trouble with the Tory-run council in Bromley. But hang on… the “grassroots revolt” of which the Guardian speaks is the councils, trying to protect their monopoly control over state schools. Here is the extract: “A flagship government policy has provoked a grassroots revolt against the coalition, with senior Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors lining up to attack the introduction of free schools, one of education secretary Michael Gove’s most cherished projects…Coalition councillors are fighting the education secretary’s plans, claiming that they

Ever the opportunist, Ed Miliband recognised that university funding could be the coalition’s first test of resolve. Opposing a tuition fee hike has given him the chance to serenade disgruntled Liberal Democrats and to discard New Labour’s sheen (which so incensed Alan Johnson, the minister who introduced the fee in such difficult circumstances). Miliband is determined to mould the Labour party in his image. Speaking on the Politics Show yesterday (16:20 in), he said that the party, Johnson included, will strive to deliver a graduate tax. After a summer’s procrastination, the government has run out of time. The substance of Lord Browne’s recommendations is in the public domain and it

The real problem for the Labour Party with the election of Ed Miliband is not the man himself, who is easy to like and, by instinct, a centrist politician from the New Labour tradition (however hard he tries to disown it now). No, the difficulty is the oddness of it the whole business. If the brother versus brother leadership contest had not been enough to cause the nation to raise a collective eyebrow, now we have the bizarre spectacle of a husband and wife taking the jobs of shadow home and foreign secretaries. This is just dead weird.  Every professional couple knows how difficult it is to hold together two

I’ve already mentioned George Osborne’s interview with the Telegraph, but it certainly merits another. As Ben Brogan says, Osborne is in a rich vein of ‘election that never was’ form. As befits the inveterate schemer, Osborne’s tactical grasp is impressive. He is quietly vociferous about Labour’s ‘historic mistake’ in electing Ed Miliband. Revealing senior Tories’ continued respect for the electoral tenets of Blairism, he says: “They have chosen to move off the historic centre ground of British politics. I’ve seen more pictures of Neil Kinnock on television in the past week than I’ve seen in 20 years. That’s old politics.” The old politics is the preserve of captive minds, wedded

Those earnest, pale and dimpled young men who staff the Labour party need to watch their drinks: Ed Miliband’s ‘New Generation’ is a haven for a well-heeled cougar. Inspired by Lady Bercow of Easy Virtue, Harriet Harman closed the Labour conference with a soliloquy in lust.   A cynic would say it was HRT talking, but Hattie was in playful and coquettish mood, as she often is – you know, young at heart and all that. More importantly, she was effective. Though I cringed through bits of her homily of the bordello – praying she’d segue into less alarmingly evocative subjects like gender equality, VAT and rape anonymity – she

David Miliband’s logic is difficult to fault. If he stayed, he would be treated as the torch bearer for those disgruntled Labour members who feel they were robbed. Without him, such people have no one to turn to. New Labour will now dissolve. ‘Progress’ – supposedly for the next generation of Blairites – held their meeting in a Manchester venue named the Comedy Store and that says it all. Game over: as Neil Kinnock put it last night “I’ve got my party back”.   No matter how loyal he would be, David Miliband could not but be seen as a focal point for the (many) Labour MPs who hate all

The fightback begins here. To that end, Ed Miliband is being offered plenty of advice by the swords around his throne. The Mirror trails his speech, pleased that it will be honest about Labour’s failings and inaugurate Labour’s ‘golden generation’. Tom Harris hopes that Miliband will remember that New Labour was successful because it was the party of aspiration, not just the dispossessed. Steve Richards wants Miliband to reach for Middle England by talking with an authentic voice, a simple contrivance that worked miracles for Tony Blair. However, we can add schizophrenia to psychodrama among Miliband’s afflictions. He was the author of a manifesto he immediately disowned, whilst refusing to concede

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