Politics Archives

Tuesday

28 Sep 2010

Miliband goes Cameron-lite

Well, it turns out that ‘Red Ed’ is really a social conservative. As both Pete and James say, his speech contained notable sallies into Cameroon territory – community and family. He didn’t follow Cameron’s trail to the metre, but fell into many of the same ditches. Two things struck me: 1). Ever the opportunist, Miliband sees that there is the kernel of a good idea at the root of the ‘Big Society’ and tried to exploit Cameron’s inability to present it. Miliband’s gave us the ‘Good Society’, a clear though sanctimonious slogan for community renewal. However, he, like Cameron, can’t define what he means by community. He talked about post

James Forsyth

Miliband produces the bare minimum, but don’t underestimate him

Ed Miliband did what he needed to do. In his speech he needed to show that he was not some demented left-winger, that he was not a tool of the unions and that he appreciates the need for cuts. He did the first bit with his tone. It is very hard to depict someone as dangerously left-wing when they appear thoroughly reasonable. The union test he got through with the line that no one in the Labour party should have any ‘truck with overblown rhetoric about waves of irresponsible strikes.’ As one Tory said to me last week, attacking him over being in hock to the unions was never going

Peter Hoskin

Ed Miliband’s speech: neither here nor there

Where are Ed Miliband’s editors? If twenty minutes had been lopped off that speech, then it might have been quite a decent little number. As it was, it dwelt too long on the past at the beginning; it hit all of its high notes in the middle; and sagged again during an protracted conclusion. Maybe if David Miliband doesn’t stand for the shadow cabinet, he might be persuaded to stick around and at least fine-tune his brother’s speeches. As for what we learnt about the MiliE leadership, most of it was presentational. The phrase “new generation” popped up with machine gun regularity, as did words like “optimism” and “change”. This

Peter Hoskin

Ed Miliband’s speech: live blog

1522, PH: We’ll leave it there. More reaction on Coffee House shortly. 1520, PH: And there’s the closing summary. He manages to squeeze “new generation” and “optimists” in several times. Then, a standing ovation, natch. 1519, PH: Weird blip as Miliband says that he wants to take on “David … Cameron”. Did he have another rival called “David” in mind? 1518, PH: A bit of life to the speech now, as Miliband takes on the Red Ed label. “Come of it,” he swipes, “let’s debate the issues that matter to Britain.” 1518, FN: A huge sigh of relief in Tory HQ, I suspect, as he says he supports Ken Clarke’s

Peter Hoskin

Behind the times

Anyone who isn’t interested in political party websites look away now. For both of you remaining, then it’s worth adding to Ben Brogan’s observation about Labour’s site. The photograph of Ed Miliband that greets you upon clicking here isn’t the best, he notes (perhaps MiliE should have used this image instead). But there’s more: at time of writing, the pages for the leadership election are still available, and Harriet Harman is still logged as the leader of the Labour party. These are only small faults, sure. No doubt it will all be fixed in the next couple of days. But it underlines a point that is whirling around Wonkland at

David Blackburn

Opportunistic Ed stuttering for an authentic voice

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

Alex Massie

Obama’s Hit Squad: Above and Beyond the Law

I think it’s reasonable to say that those Americans who hoped for some improvement – even if only of the marginal variety – from Barack Obama on the civil liberties front have often been pretty disappointed. But because American conservatives – at least those conservatives gathered in the Republican party – have no interest in these quaint notions either it’s not something that’s become a dominant theme of his presidency. And, as Mike Crowley says, it’s probable that the President calculates that the upside from pleasing the people who care about these things isn’t worth the trouble if, god forbid, something happens and he can be portrayed as “soft” on

Monday

27 Sep 2010

David Blackburn

Miliband hampered by Labour’s ongoing vacuum

Time is against Ed Miliband: there is a void where there should be a new shadow chancellor. The party leadership cannot refine its arguments ahead of next month’s spending review, upon which the immediate success of Miliband’s regime depends. A further problem is that all of Labour’s arguments are made in the past tense. The previous government’s economic record is defended with evangelical fervour; but each speaker is struck dumb when asked about specific future savings and plans. Alistair Darling closed his front-bench career this afternoon by saying, ‘The deficit is the result of the banking crisis – and the economic crisis that followed it. We had to take that

James Forsyth

Where does Miliband go now?

How to reduce the deficit is the ground on which the Tories want to take on Ed Miliband. The whole Tory war machine has been mobilised to try and use today’s IMF report which calls the Osborne deficit reduction plan ‘appropriately ambitious’ to flush out Ed Miliband’s position on the deficit. The deficit is the ground on which Labour would least like to fight right now They know that, in the words of one former Cabinet minister, ‘that his approach to the deficit is what will defined Ed politically.’ But it is hard to make this choice when you don’t know who your shadow Chancellor is and what’s in the

Peter Hoskin

Forcing an apology

Admittedly, this is but an item of marginalia in the notebook of British politics – but I’d appreciate CoffeeHousers’ views on it nonetheless. I’m talking about the Tories’ efforts to squeeze an apology out of Labour for the state of the public finances. This is something that they’ve been trying to do since the election, but the strategy has been reheated in the aftermath of Ed Miliband’s election. As Sayeeda Warsi put it on Saturday, “what I noticed in his acceptance speech was that there was … no apology for the role that he had played in the current economic mess.” Other Tory folk have called for that to be

Alex Massie

The Rise of Newt Labour

Labour’s new leader “does human”. Over-estimating Ed Miliband is the new under-estimating Ed Miliband. That’s why James, Iain Martin, Ben Brogan and, among others, David Skelton all warn against under-estimating Ed Miliband. This is the clever play. If Ed turns out to be a disaster no-one will recall warning that he might be surprisingly effective; should he actually be surprisingly effective then you can look sage and prescient. Nevertheless, people, Ed Miliband is still Ed Miliband. The manner of his victory – no matter how much and how reasonably Hopi Sen manages to dress it up – is still the Union-forged thing it is. When the strikes come – and

Peter Hoskin

The speech that David Miliband would have given on Saturday?

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

Fraser Nelson

The penny drops

David Miliband is a tease. The speech he just gave was one of his best: it was self-deprecating, had gravitas, humour, and he spoke down to the Tories, telling William Hague what statesmanship was about. A monstrous conceit, CoffeeHousers may argue, but a Labour leader needs a bit of that; to make out that he’s the real leader-in-waiting, up against lightweights. There was his trademark little bit of grit in the speech: he praised the troops, the Afghan mission and criticised Cameron for reducing British diplomacy to trade missions (Con Coughlin made the same point in a Spectator cover piece recently). My point: that this was a measurably better speech

Peter Hoskin

The defeated brother delivers a winning speech

David Miliband’s address to the Labour conference ended as it began: with a standing ovation. Sentimentality and sympathy, perhaps – but it was also deserved. This was a speech that his younger sibling will be hard pressed to match tomorrow. Indeed, I doubt even MiliD has matched it himself before now It began, of course, with an attempt to massage out the tensions of the past few days. There were some gags about how Miliband had draft speeches for Saturday and Tuesday on his computer – “so I’ve got a couple of speeches to draw on.” And he implored Labour to unite behind his brother – “we have a great

The Spectator

Just in case you missed them… | 27 September 2010

…here are some of the posts made at Spectator.co.uk over the weekend Fraser Nelson asks if Ed Miliband will face facts. James Forsyth praises the dignity of David Miliband, and urges the right not to underestimate Ed Miliband. Peter Hoskin examines the Whelan factor, and observes the start of the Ed Miliband de-toxification process. David Blackburn says that the disaster at the Delhi games indicts the Indian state. And Rod Liddle is amazed that some people voted for Diane Abbott.

David Blackburn

Oh brother, where art thou?

All eyes have turned to the future Labour front bench, particularly the identity of George Osborne’s shadow. Ed Balls has made his most obvious pitch yet. In a piece for the Guardian, bluntly titled ‘Now let’s offer a real choice – and nail the Tory lie on cuts’, he writes: ‘Being a united party is not enough. We must also win the argument. If we do not give people a positive reason to vote Labour, rather than just a temporary outlet for their protest, we will not persuade them to stick with us come the election. First, on the economy – of course we will need tough choices to

Sunday

26 Sep 2010

Rod Liddle

So some people actually voted for Abbott?

The difficult question for me is who were the 0.88 per cent of Labour MPs, and 2.5 per cent of Labour members, who thought that Diane Abbott was the best possible person to lead the Labour Party? Admittedly this is the sort of proportion of voters who at elections decide to select the candidate from the Ku Klux Klan, or the Ban Chives Now! candidate or the dribbling bearded loon in a Union Jack costume and with the body of a stuffed ferret protruding from each ear, so designed to make you think it was actually implanted in his skull and who calls himself something from a Monty Python programme

James Forsyth

Why Ed Miliband shouldn’t be underestimated

There is a feeling on the right that with the election of Ed Miliband it is back to the good old days. The thinking goes that Labour have elected a lefty as leader and it is time “to do ‘em over just like we did back in the day”. But this is overly-simplistic. First of all, Ed Miliband is certainly to the left of Tony Blair but he’s nowhere near as far left, compared to the public, as Michael Foot or Tony Benn, or anyone like that. Second, the right in the ‘80s had three fronts on which to attack left-wing politicians: economics, culture and national defence. Now, it only

James Forsyth

Labour’s subdued response to Miliband’s victory

There’s an odd mood in Manchester at the moment. The leadership election result has discombobulated the Labour establishment. In some circles, there is irritation that union votes delivered the leadership to Ed Miliband against the wishes of the MPs and party members. Others worry that this has all come too soon for Ed Miliband, that – in the words of one senior member of the last government – “he still doesn’t know what he thinks”. While others are still getting their heads round the family dynamic. It was striking that when people arrived in the conference hotel bar from the Ed Miliband victory party they were not mobbed. But Ed

Peter Hoskin

Ed Miliband tries to detoxify his brand

The scrubbing job starts in earnest this morning, as Ed Miliband tries to erase that “Red” epithet from before his name. Exhibit A was his appearance on the Andrew Marr show, in which he took every opportunity to cast the manner of his victory in a favourable light. “If you look at this as one vote-one member, then I got more votes than anyone else,” he assured us, before going on to say that he won the union vote because, “I spoke about things that matter to working people in this country.” When asked whether he would sway under pressure from the union leadership, he averred, “I’m nobody’s man, I’m