Society

Frank Luntz is the Marmite of polling: you either love him or hate him. His focus group on Newsnight tonight comparing the three party leaders made—as expected—for interesting viewing. Although I’d have preferred to see the potential Labour leadership candidates tested. I imagine that the Lib Dems will be crowing for weeks about its finding that people warmed far more to Clegg than the other two party leaders. The first thing that struck me was how Tony Blair still so dominates British politics. The panellists saw both Brown and Cameron through the prism of Blair. When the group were offered the chance to bring Blair back, they went for it

Yesterday, Downing Street was keen to take the credit for the Lloyd’s HBOS deal. But Brown is playing a dangerous game. First of all, there is the issue highlighted by Alphaville of whether there has been tinkering with the deal to make sure that Edinburgh remains a major UK financial centre. It also appears that someone has leaned on Lloyds not to make the maximum efficiency savings. Then, there is the question of what Brown is doing apparently telling Lloyds to lend in the way that HBOS did. The FT’s Westminster blog reports Brown as saying, “We’ve also insisted on assurances from the new company [Lloyds/HBOS] about their mortgage lending

The most interesting conversation in Westminster right now is what a new Labour leader could do to restore the party’s fortunes. One idea that could be particularly politically potent is a bold move on tax. Since Labour came to power, the number of people paying the top rate of tax has pretty much doubled. Brown has kept Labour’s 1997 manifesto promise not to raise the top rate of income tax but he has done so at the cost of making more and more people pay tax at the top rate; a typical Brown dodge. This fiscal drag has had the same effect as an actual tax rise and resulted in

One of the things that the rebels have got right so far is not turning this into a personal campaign against Gordon Brown. The Labour party is reluctant to dump its leader, they really don’t do assassination, and so the clever thing to do is to coax rather than bully them into it. By this standard, George Howarth’s remarks comparing Brown to Neville Chamberlain are a mistake. On Newsnight, Howarth declared: “He’s so unpopular that no one can remember a time since Neville Chamberlain, after Hitler invaded Norway, that anyone was so unpopular. “And we can’t allow that situation to continue.” This is the kind of remark that might create