Politics

Read about the latest UK political news, views and analysis.

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband: a prophet without notes

Why does Ed Miliband think memorising a speech is more important than convincing voters that Labour really can be tough on the deficit? It wasn’t just his performance yesterday, in which the Labour leader failed to communicate key passages on the economy and immigration (James has them here), but the lack of candour from anyone on the stage about the scale of the challenge facing a Labour government if it came to power next year. Ed Balls said Labour was facing difficult, unpopular decisions, but then undermined his bad cop routine rather by announcing two relatively uncontroversial cuts. On the Today programme Miliband tried to argue that his speech had

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Westminster prepares for recall to discuss air strikes

Parliament is expected to be recalled on Friday to discuss British military intervention against Isis. David Cameron will hold talks with his Iraqi counterpart today, with Haider al-Abadi expected to make a formal request that Britain join the military action. Labour is staying supportively non-committal at the moment, with Ed Miliband saying again on the Today programme that Labour hadn’t yet been approached, but that it would consider anything the government put on the table: ‘I think the situation in Syria is somewhat different, in that’s it’s not a democratic state, we’ve got the Assad regime in Syria, we called yesterday, we supported the American action, but we called yesterday

Tuesday

John O'Neill

Miliband’s people

Have you met Ed Miliband recently? Then he probably namechecked you in his speech earlier today. Unless you talked about the deficit or immigration, that is. Here’s the full list of people he met: 1. Josephine – a cleaner who hadn’t decided how she would vote in the Scottish independence referendum. I was on my way to a public meeting. I was late as politicians tend to be. And just outside the meeting I met a woman and I was supposed to be going into the meeting but I wanted to stop and ask her how she was voting. I did that to everybody on the street. One vote at

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The deficit and immigration: were there two worse topics for Ed Miliband to forget?

No notes speech have been Ed Miliband’s political party trick. His One Nation speech two years ago ended speculation about his leadership and last year’s energy price freeze effort knocked the Tories off their stride for months. But today, the no notes speech hurt Miliband rather than helped him. Without an autocue, Miliband skipped bits of the speech. This has happened to him before, one year he missed out the section on the environment. But this year, Miliband missed out the bits he could least afford to: forgetting the sections on the deficit and immigration. listen to ‘Ed Miliband’s speech: podcast special’ on audioBoom

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The Scottish Catholic bishops and the Nationalists: a scandal is coming to light

Professor Tom Gallagher, a Scottish Catholic historian, wrote a post here yesterday accusing the Catholic hierarchy of Scotland of covertly supporting the Yes campaign. Now there are two pieces of evidence to support his claim. The first is a letter from Archbishop Philip Tartaglia of Glasgow to departing First Minister Alex Salmond. Never have I witnessed a senior cleric suck up to a politician so shamelessly. Truly he has earned Private Eye’s Order of the Brown Nose (OBN). Dear First Minister, You have announced your decision to step down as First Minister of Scotland and Leader of the Scottish National Party. On behalf of the Bishops Conference of Scotland, I

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Five main points from Michael Fallon’s hawkish interview in The Spectator

James Forsyth interviews Defence Secretary Michael Fallon in this week’s Spectator. You can read the full interview here. Here are five key points from the piece: 1. A ‘new Battle of Britain’:  ‘We’ve had attacks on the streets of London, on our transport system, at Glasgow Airport, the murder of Lee Rigby – how much more evidence do you need that this is a very clear and dangerous threat to our way of life and to all the democracies of the west.  This is a new Battle of Britain.’ 2. MPs need ‘courage’ to vote for military intervention:   ‘I hope parliament now will have the courage shown by our

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Podcast special: Miliband’s speech, the verdict

Ed Miliband has spoken – for 65 minutes – snarling at Tories, while laying out his 10-year plan and presenting himself as the man who can shake up the complacent Westminster elite. James, Isabel and I were all there in Manchester and we met up straight afterwards to compare notes. Here’s our combined verdict: listen to ‘Ed Miliband’s speech: podcast special’ on audioBoom

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband’s speech, like the rest of this conference, was poor but just about enough

Whether or not Ed Miliband’s speech was a success depends on what sort of aim he had for it: heave Labour over the general election line using his party base, or reach out to wavering swing voters by arguing that Labour has the ability to govern in the challenging circumstances that it finds itself in after the 2015 election, that it has a vision for aspirational voters, and that it really understands why its working class voters deserted it in 2010. listen to ‘Ed Miliband’s speech: podcast special’ on audioBoom Let’s address the second aim first. It was not a good speech. It did not have a sufficiently well-crafted message.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Miliband’s speech showed he couldn’t care less about leading ‘one nation’

I think I’m about the only journalist to have watched Ed Miliband’s speech and think it wasn’t awful. Here in Manchester, the consensus seems to be that this was as bad as a speech could be. And, admittedly, even I was tweeting rude things about it all of the way through (since when does anyone need a 10-year plan? Britain won a world war in six years). You may not like the politics but his speech was intellectually coherent, even pugnacious in parts. Sure, it was about an hour too long and had some worrying lacunas. His decision not to mention the economy was wise because he has nothing to say. There was no

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Exclusive: Michael Fallon says UK should reconsider military action in Syria to combat ISIS

The Ministry of Defence is like a sauna on Sunday. The air circulation system has been switched off and the place is hot—and deserted. Yet when you reach the Secretary of State’s floor, a small team is hard at work. As you enter Michael Fallon’s office, you see the reason why. On an easel sits a map of Iraq and Syria. Tellingly, though, this isn’t the only map on the stand. Sitting behind it are ones of Pakistan, the Central African Republic and Sierra Leone. It becomes clear as the interview goes on that the one of Ukraine has gone missing. Fallon is 62, but he has the energy of a man half his age.

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Miliband’s dividing lines

The more we learn about Ed Miliband’s speech (to be given later this afternoon), the clearer the dividing lines that it is drawing are. The word is that Miliband will announce more money for the NHS paid for by a combination of taxes on mansions, hedge funds and big tobacco. The message: Labour stands up for the NHS while the Tories stand up for people who live in mansions, hedge funds and tobacco companies. This might be crude politics but it will, I suspect, be quite effective. It emphasises Labour’s biggest strength, that they are the party of the NHS and social solidarity, and highlights the Tories’ biggest weakness, the

Steerpike Steerpike

Justine Thornton becomes Justine Miliband for Labour campaign

Having spent four years sticking to a wave at the end of conference and the odd photograph together with her husband, Justine Thornton has burst onto centre stage at Labour’s conference. Mrs Miliband – and she uses her Miliband name today – has written to Labour activists pledging her commitment to getting her man into Downing Street: ‘Honestly, as a young lawyer who wanted to change the world, I never would have believed that I would become a politician’s wife. It’s not a role you apply for, nor one I’ve found easy to understand. Just after Ed won, I Googled a few terms to see if there were books I

Steerpike Steerpike

Shadow ministerial munchies

Fancy a cheeky chew on Chuka, a bite of Balls or a munch on Miliband? At last night’s Sky party at Labour conference, the Shadow Cabinet were out in force – on macaroons, presumably to help with the cost of pudding crisis for hardworking people. Those around Miliband often get sniped at for being weak, but these macaroons were crunchy and had plenty of bite. Bizarrely, Eric Pickles gatecrashed the party at one point, albeit in slightly less robust form than usual: The question is, who is the least tasty shadow minister? Mr Steerpike’s bakery source says it was the Shadow Business Secretary who ended up lingering longest on the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour says it will consider British air strikes as recall of Parliament looms

What will happen now that the US has launched airstrikes against Isis in Syria? Even though there is no requirement for Parliament to be consulted, it is very difficult for the British government to join without some form of debate and vote in the House of Commons. And this means that a recall of Parliament before it is scheduled to sit on 13 October. The end of this week is most likely, but there remains a debate at the top of the Tory party as to whether David Cameron could win a vote supporting British action. This is surprising, given so many of those who opposed action against Assad last

Monday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The simple and shocking secret to the working class vote

How does Labour win back the working class voters who’ve abandoned it? This question, part of the soul searching the party fell into when it lost the 2010 election, has gained even greater currency since the Scottish referendum. This evening Michael Dugher and John Denham had a stab at answering it at a conference fringe. And the answers were really quite unsettling. Denham told the fringe that ‘we’re talking to people who’ve come to the conclusion that governments are a bonus if they don’t make their lives worse’ and therefore just one policy wasn’t going to solve it. He said: ‘We have to get back into a relationship with people

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Why is Labour’s Shadow Cabinet saying so little?

Normally the default response in the Labour party to a rough couple of weeks is to blame the Shadow Cabinet. They’re not pulling together, they’re thinking about their own future leadership prospects rather than backing Ed Miliband and so on and so forth. But while the Shadow Cabinet is looking weak this week at their party conference, for once it is not their fault. They are standing under a banner that announces ‘Labour’s Plan for Britain’s Future’, but then say no more about that plan. They are all being sent naked into the conference hall. All they are being required to talk about is their values, and what they have

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Chuka Umunna: the last disciple of New Labour’s third way

Chuka Umunna is the last disciple of the third way standing. At a Times fringe earlier, he was full of praise for centre-left European reformers such as the Italian PM Matteo Renzi and French PM Manuel Valls. Indeed, when Umunna spoke approvingly of the battle that Valls is having with his own party one sensed that it was something that Umunna would like to do himself. Umunna sought to portray himself as the reasonable outsider. He said that the biggest challenge in politics was to make compromise fashionable again. He urged the Labour party to embrace entrepreneurs and his tone about business and technology was unremittingly hopeful. His desire to command as much political

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Why the Tories can’t really criticise Rachel Reeves on debt

Rachel Reeves’ interview on BBC Daily Politics may have been excruciating at times (below), but was it really the ‘car crash’ that the Tories are today claiming? Matthew Hancock is crowing that she pointed out the conditions necessary for reducing debt. She said:- ‘We are planning to get the national debt down, which means you have to be running a surplus to be able to do that. If you are going to have national debt falling you have to have a surplus overall… To get debt falling you have to have a surplus on overall spending.’  Whether wittingly or not, Reeves went further than Ed Balls. She said she wants a

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Len McCluskey: Ed Balls’s long speech was good in parts

One thing that made Ed Balls’ speech to conference look a little less impressive was the barnstormer of an address from Len McCluskey to the hall shortly before. Delegates loved it, and not just because the Unite leader was saying the sorts of things that they wanted to hear. He was also passionate and interesting. He deservedly received the first proper standing ovation of the week. So what did McCluskey think of the speech that followed from Ed Balls? I caught up with the union boss afterwards, and he managed some faint praise: ‘Well, I think it was a long speech, and it was a very embracing speech, and I