Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.
Damian McBride certainly seems to have brought the edge back to Labour politics. LBC’s Iain Dale got into a fight with an anti-nuclear protester, who was interrupting an interview with McBride. Thanks to a wandering PA photographer, you can see Mr Dale dealing with him:
Every morning throughout party conference season, we’ll be providing our pick of the fringe events on Coffee House. We’ve reached the third day of Labour’s annual conference in Brighton, and as the saying goes, the early conference bird catches the fringe worm. There’s plenty of past and present frontbenchers making appearances, on a variety of topics, throughout the day: Title Key speaker(s) Time Location Governing from the Left: Economic competence… Margaret Hodge 08:00 Lancing 1, Holiday Inn Returning to growth: How can Britain build a stronger economy? (invite only) Lord Adonis 08:00 Brighton Media Centre Value and values: What is a One Nation business model? Tessa Jowell, Toby Perkins 08:00
Damian McBride broke cover and made his first broadcast appearance this evening on Newsnight, defending his upcoming memoirs. McBride said he is ‘sorry and ashamed’ for those he targeted while in government. Part one of his interview is above and the second half below:
Why does the right like Labour’s Jon Cruddas so much? Because he’s actually a conservative. He’s just admitted as much in a fringe meeting, hosted by my colleagues at the Centre for Social Justice. He was talking about his own politics: conservative, he said. But in a Labour way. ‘I don’t go in for the self-analysis that much,’ he said, but he liked the ‘romantic traditions’ of Labour and part of it was always about defence of family and traditions from ‘relentless commodification of our lives… and that’s the tradition I come from’. A tradition which had been crushed by the Fabian element in recent decades, he said, but one
Up until about 2004, the Labour government’s strategy of fighting poverty by concentrating on three priorities – government spending, government spending and government spending – had seemed to work rather well. On a number of measures, living standards of low- to middle-income earners showed notable improvements. But from then on, progress on this front suddenly came to a halt, or even went into reverse again on some measures. This was a bit of an embarrassment for advocates of a Greek-style approach to public spending, because during those years, they had largely gotten their way. Social spending in the UK had reached record levels, and with that potential largely exhausted, what
Ed Balls has just taken the scalpel to HS2 in an interview with Steve Richards. He talked about the project having ‘huge fiscal implications’ and questioned whether the ‘benefits are really there’. He then went on to stress that the question was not just whether HS2 provided value for money, but whether it was the best use of £50 billion. As he emphasised, £50 billion could be used on other transport projects or new housing, hospitals and schools. One could see Balls gleefully contemplating just how much fiscal wriggle room cancelling HS2 would give him. Now, Balls did say that Labour had not reached a final decision on what to
I was at a funeral on Friday and so late catching-up with the latest entertainment provided by UKIP. But, gosh, thank heavens for Godfrey Bloom. Not just because he and his ilk have injected some welcome craziness into British politics – the circus always needs new clowns – but because by doing so they have reminded us of the stakes involved. Bloom – last heard decrying aid squandered on feckless Bongo Bongo Land – one-upped himself with his talk of sluts who fail to clean their kitchens properly. Sure, there was something refreshing about hearing Nigel Farage admit all this amounted to a disaster for UKIP but the bigger point is that
As part of the Labour conference focus on the cost of living, the party will be going to great efforts this week to reclaim its presumed title as the party of ‘council housing’. Expect to hear private builders bashed for squirrelling away land plots rather than piling ‘em high with apartments as they should. And the pillorying of the right to buy policy, ritually chastised as it is each conference as the chief reason for the country’s interminable descent into social housing drought. What you’re unlikely to hear is a serious admission by Labour of its appalling track record on council housing supply. That local authority housing passed into private
Much of the talk down in Brighton is of the coming shadow Cabinet reshuffle. One person frequently tipped for the chop is Stephen Twigg, the shadow Education secretary. There’s much chatter that he might be replaced by Liz Kendall. But judging by his interview in today’s Evening Standard, Twigg won’t go quietly. He declares that he’s not going to try to change the fact that most secondary schools are now academies and that ‘if further schools want to convert that’s fine by me.’ This is Twigg telling those on the Labour left who are opposed to academies to get their tanks off his lawn. He’s also making clear that if
So far the tensions in the Labour party over Ed Miliband’s plan to reform the link with the trade unions have stayed below the surface at this conference. The closest it came was, unsurprisingly, when Len McCluskey took to the stage. The Unite leader made another plea for the unions to ‘set our vision of how we will build our country in government’, and told the leadership (Ed Miliband had strangely disappeared from the stage at this point) that ‘if OUR party is to have a future it must speak for ordinary workers and it must represent the voice of organised labour’. He also made his customary attack on the
Here we go again. A group of Islamist terrorists armed with guns and grenades head into a shopping mall in Kenya. They separate out the Muslims from the non-Muslims, let the former go free and massacre the latter. Cue the usual responses. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, says: ‘These appalling terrorist attacks that take place where the perpetrators claim they do it in the name of a religion – they don’t. They do it in the name of terror, violence and extremism and their warped view of the world. They don’t represent Islam or Muslims in Britain or anywhere else in the world.’ I don’t think any sensible person would argue
Do you know the name of Muhammed’s mother? No, me neither. I can manage the names of two of his wives and his Christian concubine, plus his daughter, but not his mother. The matter was, however, of more than academic interest when gunmen took over the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi. According to witnesses, members of the public were lined up and then gunned down if they failed to name the mother of the founder of Islam or recite verses from the Koran. Those lucky enough to be able to speak Arabic — possibly passages from the Koran — were let go. The rest were fair game. Now, whatever else
I will admit to a grudging admiration for Ed Balls. He’s wrong about most things, dangerously so. But his speeches are always well-considered, full of substance and usually part of a strategy that he keeps up for months if not years. For that reason, his speeches are always worth reading. This was a good speech, full of substance and forceful expositions of classic leftist errors. Aside from his bizarre towel joke, here’s what jumped out at me from his speech here at the Labour conference in Brighton:- 1. Back to the 1970s! Balls pledges to reverse reform and return to the pre-Blair Labour. Ed Balls was always against the Blair-era
Below is the text and full audio of Ed Balls’ conference speech given today in Brighton, as released by Labour’s press office. But there’s one section missing. It’s the one where Balls said:- listen to ‘Ed Balls: ‘I just thought it was a surprisingly small towel’’ on Audioboo
As Ed Balls knows, people tend only to remember one thing about a speech. A word if you’re lucky, a sentence if you’re really lucky. Or an image. Perhaps he was relyijg on HS2 to grab the headlines because the image he conjured up for us today was David Cameron getting changed in the beach with a Micky Mouse towel: not a fat Prime Minister, you understand. Balls tells us that his wife, Yvette Cooper, was impressed at how “for a 46-year-old man, David Cameron looked rather slim. Slim? What on earth she mean? And here’s the Jim Davidson-style punchline: “I just thought for a Prime Minister, it was a
Ed Balls is currently addressing the Labour conference, and we’ll post full analysis of his speech once he’s done. But as he continues, it’s worth highlighting that the Shadow Chancellor has just given his strongest indication yet that Labour will drop its support for HS2. He said: ‘David Cameron and George Osborne have made clear they will go full steam ahead with this project – no matter how much the costs spiral up and up. They seem willing to put their own pride and vanity above best value for money for the taxpayer. ‘Labour will not take this irresponsible approach. So let me be clear, in tough times – when there
listen to ‘Len McCluskey: ‘If our party is to have a future it must speak for working people and organised labour’’ on Audioboo
Eddie Izzard’s alleged mayoral ambitions have been well documented, although he’s coy of going on the record about any plans. But mayor of where, exactly? There’s been lots of noise about London; but Izzard has been surprising people at parties recently by speaking with a Scottish accent. Tongues have been wagging. Is the funny man who believes in ‘equal clothing rights’, the political activist who enthusiastically endorsed the Euro, Gordon Brown, Yes2AV and Ken Livingstone, seeking a political career north of the border? It seems not. Izzard explained, with a Caledonian drawl, to my mole that he ‘was in character’ while preparing to play a Scotsman in a BBC drama.
When Ed Miliband dropped his support for the government’s motion on military intervention in Syria, it was seen as a convenient way of the Labour leader avoiding the thorny question of what his party really thinks about the principle of intervention. He and his team were astonished when David Cameron said ‘I get that’ and took the option off the table entirely, but privately they admitted that it wasn’t the most inconvenient thing that could happen. But today, Miliband’s Shadow Defence Secretary Jim Murphy delivered another one of his measured, impressive speeches on the party’s defence policy in which he reminded party activists that in spite of the ghosts of
Climate science is, once again, on the horns of a very uncomfortable dilemma. Whatever the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chooses to do in the next few weeks its decision looks set to explode in its face. Crises are something of a feature of the IPCC. Since its First Assessment appeared back in 1990, each of the panel’s periodic pronouncements on the global climate has plunged it into controversy. In the Second Assessment of 1995, the report’s headline claim – that a ‘fingerprint’ of manmade global warming had been detected – caused uproar when it was discovered that it had been inserted into the text at the last moment.