Ed miliband

After PMQs today, David Cameron must be wishing he could just get on and deliver his much-trailed Europe speech. Ed Miliband took advantage of all the speculation to mockingly question Cameron on the subject, asking him to comment on every bit of process. Cameron wouldn’t rule out this morning’s James Chapman scoop that Tory ministers will be allowed to campaign on different sides of the referendum question. This made it all too easy for Miliband to get away the line: ‘ it’s the same old Tories, a divided party and a weak Prime Minister’. For Miliband, that was mission accomplished. Those close to Cameron are arguing that Miliband has now

The perfect news to greet a freezing Britain today — energy bills are set to take another hike thanks to a series of dodgy wind energy contracts. According to today’s Telegraph, a ‘shocking series of errors’ has resulted in deals worth £17 billion stacked in the favour of turbine manufacturers. As well as wasting taxpayers’ money, it appears the excessive costs of these contracts could be handed down to families, placing an extra strain on households at a time when family incomes are being pushed to the limit. Who do we have to thank? Although the contracts were awarded by the coalition in March 2011, the ludicrous deals were dreamt

Refusing to publish your 2015 manifesto at the start of 2013 is, obviously, a sensible one. However uncomfortable Labour frontbenchers have felt over the past two and a half years about not being able to respond to the jeers of ‘well, what would you do then?’ from ministers at departmental questions, writing another one of the longest suicide notes in history would have left them in still greater discomfort at the polls. But how do voters know whether to trust you or not when they’ve only recently booted you out of government? Ed Miliband was trying to explain this tension to James Landale on Marr this morning. Miliband: But, James,

If you didn’t like New Labour much, then you have something in common with Ed Miliband — who appears to have loathed it. He’s just given his first speech of the year to the Fabian Society, the torch-bearers of an older type of socialism, and his audience was left in no doubt that if elected, he would offer a very different type of left-wing politics to that he helped served up when working for the Blair/Brown governments. Miliband has hammered nails into the coffin of New Labour before, notably in a speech in September 2010 just days after he was elected Labour leader. Today, he wanted to make sure the

Seemed a good idea at the time. Ed Miliband decided that the progress report published by the Coalition is a ‘secret audit’. At today’s PMQs he accused Cameron of sneaking it out in order to dodge bad coverage. Poor old Ed. He can’t read the chess-match more than one move ahead. The PM gave the obvious answer. Labour has never fessed up to the gap between its promises and its achievements. The Coalition has. ‘A week sitting in the Canary Islands with nothing else to think of,’ mocked Cameron. ‘Is this the best he can do?’ ‘Well, he’s going to have to do better than that,’ said Miliband from his

Time was when Ed Miliband had plenty to say about François Hollande. When the new French President celebrated his victory in May, the Labour leader praised Hollande for his ‘determination to help create a Europe of growth and jobs, in a way that is responsible and sustainable’. He added: ‘This new leadership is sorely needed as Europe seeks to escape from austerity. And it matters to Britain.’ Then, Miliband was keen to work together with his new friend Hollande. Just a few months down the line, though, Labour has a bit less to say about how the French president is a shining example of the centre-left showing leadership and hope

According to a spuriously scientific study, today is the day when festive excess gets the better of us, with one in two Brits opting to stay on the sofa with the curtains closed fretting about bills and weight gain. So how fortunate it is that Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband have chosen to rouse a hungover nation today with their stirring new year messages. Ed Miliband promises that he will be setting out ‘concrete steps’ on how One Nation Labour will work, citing business, education and welfare as examples. He does add that he doesn’t ‘offer easy answers and I’m not going to offer false promises either’. But it’s difficult

A fascinating PMQs. Labour staged one of the most carefully orchestrated attacks on David Cameron they’ve ever mounted. It was relentless. Ed Miliband kicked off by asking the PM about the six fold rise in food-bank dependency. Cheekily, Cameron praised Miliband for applauding the volunteer spirit. ‘It’s what I call the Big Society.’ Miliband gave him the ‘withering disbelief’ look which he practises in the mirror. He then revealed that two out of every three teachers ‘know a colleague’ who has given food or cash to famished children. Cameron shrugged this aside and replied that he wanted to do the most for the poorest. And when Miliband produced his favourite

Today’s PMQs was visceral stuff. Ed Miliband accused the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of being Bullingdons Boy who were taking decisions about ‘people they’ll never meet, people, people whose lives they’ll never understand.’ Cameron gave as good as he got, attacking Labour as the ‘party of unlimited benefits’ and said that Miliband ‘only stands up for those who claim.’ These exchanges over the decision to limit the increase in working age benefits to 1% in the autumn statement cheered up both side of the House, the Lib Dem benches looked a bit glum though. Labour and the Tories are both comfortable with these battles lines—convinced that the public is

Ed Miliband is ready to wage war with David Cameron and George Osborne over the Welfare Uprating Bill, which will see benefits rise by 1 per cent a year, rather than in line with inflation. The Labour leader has been talking tough in the papers this morning, with a piece in the Sunday Mirror in which he says: ‘We should be tough on the minority who can work and try to avoid responsibility. But there comes a moment when a government is exposed for who they are. That happened to David Cameron and George Osborne this week. ‘They showed they are not fit to govern because they played political games

In addition to his effective attack on Labour’s welfare policy, George Osborne used the Autumn Statement to take on Ed Miliband on another key electoral battleground. Over the past few months, the Labour leader has been trying to convince voters that he has the solution to their cost of living woes. His biggest offer so far has been the Living Wage, which sounds lovely to voters because it involves them being paid more money, but actually doesn’t work (something Miliband is clearly sufficiently aware of to stop him pledging to make a living wage mandatory). The coalition already had its own offer in the form of the rise in the

The biggest risk in punditry is the determination to see what you want to see. Confirmation bias is an ever-present clear and present danger to solid thinking. Nevertheless, though keeping this in mind, I wonder if Ed Miliband’s reaction to the Leveson Report has been wise, far less a response that will help him win the next election. By “wise” I mean wise in a purely political sense, not “wise” as in appropriate, sensible or well-judged. The Labour leader’s demand that Leveson’s recommendations be implemented is, in its way, remarkable. This, after all, is a 2,000 page report published in four volumes. And yet within this mountain of ponderous, muddle-headed

Following this afternoon’s statements I am certain that David Cameron is in a minority in the House of Commons in not wanting to create a statutory back-stop for a press regulator. But, so far, no one can explain how even an alliance of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Eustice Tories can force the Prime Minister to provide parliamentary time for a bill that he doesn’t want. Cameron got the tone and content of his statement right. I’m reassured that Cameron appreciates that while he set up an inquiry, he didn’t outsource his judgment to Lord Justice Leveson. He is also surely correct that a press law, however brief, would have worrying

While Leveson packs his sun-cream and flip-flops and prepares for a holiday in Australia, the nation holds its breath in anticipation of his report. One lucky citizen, the prime minister, is permitted a sneak glance at the findings of the great inquisitor into press malpractice. At 11.45 this morning, the monumental hardback landed with a thump on Number 10’s doormat. David Cameron barely had time to turn to the index and see how many name-checks he’d been given before he was whisked off to the Commons to answer questions from Ed Miliband. It was not a great occasion. The opposition leader challenged Cameron on the failure of the Work Programme,