Ed miliband

Every so often, British sportsmen are prevailed upon not to go to certain countries, in protest at some usually-hideous policy. Now it’s the turn of our racing drivers. Yvette Cooper said on Question Time last night that, at the very least, Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton should pull out of the Formula One race this weekend. Ed Miliband wants the race to be cancelled. What baffles me is that the racing drivers should be seen as so controversial, whereas (so far as I can tell) neither Cooper nor Miliband has had anything to say about the British government approving the sale of arms to Bahrain long after its uprising started

The Tories reckon that Ed Miliband’s proposed donation cap of £5,000 is a con that will hit their funding every year, while preserving Labour’s funds except at election time thanks to the union levy being exempt. Housing minister and regular attack-dog Grant Shapps laid out the party’s position on Andrew Neil’s BBC Sunday Politics show earlier today. Here is the transcript of their exchange: Shapps: Well I watched the interview and I thought this sounds big and important, so to a quick look afterwards and discovered that of the £10m Labour got from the unions last year, they still get 9.9 million of it, so this is a complete wheeze, one of

It took the Tory party 15 years to recover from the bad blood created by Margaret Thatcher’s forced resignation. So it is, perhaps, unsurprising that five years on, the bitterness from Tony Blair’s being pushed out of office has not yet subsided. Phil Collins, who was a speechwriter to Blair, has today written a scathing piece about Tom Watson, the leader of the so-called curry house coup against Blair. Collins accuses Watson of putting the ‘occupation of internal power’ in the party by his faction above the interests of the Labour party. Watson, who is Labour’s election campaigns coordinator, exerts a huge influence over Labour’s internal processes and candidate selection,

The big question in British politics right now is what happens when the voters are dissatisfied with all the three main parties and their leaders. According to a recent opinion poll, David Cameron’s approval rating is now down to minus 27. According to the invaluable Anthony Wells, this is the lowest it has been since Cameron became Tory leader. But the PM’s numbers look positively healthy compared to Miliband’s (minus 41) and Clegg’s (minus 53). Dissatisfaction with political leaders isn’t the only indicator that people aren’t happy. As I report in the column this week, senior Downing Street aides have been much struck by polling showing that more than 40

Remember when Ed Miliband couldn’t be found anywhere? Now you can barely get away from him. The Labour leader has been conspicuous by his presence over the past week, whether on the airwaves or in graffiti form (see left, a photo taken on London’s South Bank yesterday). And he’s continued that hi-vis trend today, by launching Labour’s local election campaign in Birmingham. Two things stand out from the speech he gave at that event. The first was his heavy emphasis on the pledges he announced last week: capping railway fares, unfreezing the personal allowance for pensioners, etc. As I blogged at the time, it’s doubtful whether these will actually achieve

Have the opinion polls ever looked more discouraging, overall, for the Tories during this government? Not that I can remember, although I’m happy to be corrected. Not only does YouGov’s poll for the Sunday Times (£) have Labour ahead by nine points, but there are also some pretty dismal supplementary findings. For YouGov, both David Cameron and the coalition score their lowest approval ratings since the start of this Parliament. For ComRes in the Independent on Sunday, 72 per cent of respondents reckon the government is ‘out of touch with ordinary voters’; 81 per cent say the government created ‘unnecessary panic’ over fuel; and so on. It’s probably no surprise

An unedifying week in politics keeps on getting worse. The Tories have this morning sent out a press release headlined ‘Warsi: If Labour can’t win in Bradford, how can they win a general election?’ The full quotation follows further on: ‘If Labour can’t win one of their safe seats in these tough economic times and in a tough week for the Government, how can they win anywhere? Not in half a century has an opposition come back from such an appalling result to win a majority at the next general election.   This tells you everything you need to know about Ed Miliband’s weak leadership.’ It’s characteristic of much of

Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet could soon lack a Liam Byrne. The shadow work and pensions secretary is expected to announce his intention to run for the position of Mayor of Birmingham — and he’d quit his frontbench job to do so. There is, of course, one significant ‘if’ hanging over his candidacy: it would depend on Birmingham voting in favour of having an elected mayor in their referendum on 3 May. But given the polls so far, it’s all looking quite likely. If Byrne does go, it would leave more than just a single role for Miliband to fill. He is not just the shadow work and pensions secretary, but

The row over the so-called pasty tax is a proxy. It is really a row about whether David Cameron and George Osborne get what it is like to worry about the family budget each week.   In truth, I suspect that they don’t. But I think the same probably goes for Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and the vast majority of journalists. Most of the politics of class in Westminster, as opposed to the country, is the narcissism of small difference.   The best thing the coalition could do now is hold its nerve. The Budget did reveal that support for it is shallow. But, as one leading pollster said to

Introducing Ed Miliband, Labour’s best hope since Tony Blair. Oh, I’m kidding, of course — but it’s still striking that, this morning, Labour have their biggest lead in a ComRes poll for seven years. And the size of the lead? Ten points, but it could be even bigger. The Peter Cruddas revelations fell right in the middle of ComRes’s polling. Apparently, those interviews conducted after Sunday had Labour with a 17-point lead. Of course, you can slap every caveat across this that you like: we’re still ages away from the election; one poll does not make a trend; the 17-point figure is based on a subset of a subset of