Politics

The Labour leader Ed Miliband has been determined not to define himself by picking fights against his own side. He didn’t want to do a Blair or a Cameron and triangulate his way to power. Rather, his model was, in one respect, Thatcher. His team were struck by how she managed to move the political centre from opposition. But Miliband now finds his own side picking fights against him. As Pete blogged earlier, Unite’s Len McCluskey has launched an intemperate attack on him in The Guardian. McCluskey claims that Miliband’s recognition that Labour’s starting point has to be that the cuts will be reality by 2015 has ‘undermined his leadership’. He

It’s far from the first poll on Scottish independence in recent years, or even in recent days, but YouGov’s effort for Channel4 this evening contains some noteworthy findings nonetheless. What is does is replicate the conditions that — for the reasons that Peter Kellner explains in a very useful blog post here — Alex Salmond would like in 2014. Which means two questions, one after the other. First, status quo or ‘devo-max’? Second, status quo or full independence? And the results? By YouGov’s count, 58 per cent of people are in favour of ‘devo-max’ for the first question, with 42 per cent against. And, for the second question, 39 per

Ed Miliband’s poll ratings are going from bad to disastrous at the moment. Last week his YouGov approval rating dropped to its worst ever, with just 20 per cent of respondents saying he’s doing a good job, and 66 per cent saying he’s doing a bad one. And today they slip even further. Again 20 per cent say he’s doing ‘well’, but now 69 per cent say ‘badly’: And, most worryingly for the Labour leader, the number of Labour voters giving him the thumbs down (49 per cent) now outnumbers those giving him the thumps up (46 per cent). That’s compared to the 95 per cent of Tories who think

Even as Ed Balls embraces the need for austerity today, he takes a very different position to the coalition on why it’s necessary. The government has always blamed the need for cuts on the ‘awful economic inheritance’ bequeathed it by Labour. Balls, on the other hand, puts the blame squarely at George Osborne’s door. In his Fabian Society speech, he said: ‘George Osborne’s economic mistakes mean more difficult decisions on tax, spending and pay.’ His argument is that, by cutting ‘too far and too fast’, the coalition has caused the economy to stagnate and thereby created the need for more austerity. Labour has, of course, long been trying to shift