Ed miliband

Ed Miliband is busy trying to shift both his party and the centre ground to the left. To that end, he announced his support for the Palestinian bid for statehood, which, as Martin Bright notes, was an attempt to distance himself from the legacy of Blair, and to a lesser extent Brown, by supporting a definitively left-wing cause. The British Opposition’s view on Palestinian statehood is utterly immaterial to the Middle East peace process, so the announcement was merely a presentational ruse, a reminder that Miliband is unlikely to talk about substance until Liam Byrne has published the party’s policy review later this year. By chance, Liam Byrne has written an article

Ed Miliband’s pre-conference interviews in Progress and the New Statesman serve as a reminder of the Labour leader’s desire to move the political centre ground. To the New Statesman he talks repeatedly of changing the current ‘settlement’ both economic and political. I presume by that he means the orthodoxies of the Thatcher-Blair era. Indeed, he tells Progress of one area where he wants to do things differently: ‘…people used to say “it is anti-aspiration to talk about people at the top”, it is not anti-aspiration – it is pro-aspiration. It is pro-aspiration because if you have got banks who are not doing the right thing, if you’ve got people in banks

Listening to Nick Clegg’s speech today, there was little doubt which party he’d rather be in coalition with. There were some coded slights at the Tories’ expense—the emphasis on how the Lib Dems had been ‘fighting to keep the NHS safe’ and his commitment that the Human Rights Act was here to stay—but they were nothing compared to the full frontal attacks on Labour. Clegg derided Miliband and Balls as the ‘backroom boys’ before warning the country to ‘never, ever trust Labour with the economy again.’ This line reveals something very important, the Lib Dem leadership believes that the more the economy is in trouble the more important it is

Cameron and Miliband went six rounds on the economy at PMQs. Miliband tried to portray Cameron as just another Tory who thinks that “unemployment is a price worth paying”. Cameron, for his part, wanted to paint the Labour leader as someone whose policies would send Britain tumbling into a sovereign debt crisis. At the end, it felt like a bit of a no-score draw. Interestingly, Cameron stressed that “every week and every month, we’ll be adding to that growth programme”. We’ll have to see whether he’s talking about more small-bore measures, or something bigger on infrastructure investment. Labour had a new tactic today, trying to fact-check all of Cameron’s answers

David Cameron and IDS have been promoting the Work Programme this afternoon and they reiterated that jobseekers must learn English to claim benefits if their language difficulties are hampering their job applications. It’s another indication of the government’s radical approach to welfare reform. Aside from that, the main event in Westminster today was Ed Miliband’s speech to the TUC. Miliband was widely heckled by the Brothers, especially when he told them: “Let me just tell you about my experience of academies as I’ve got two academies in my own constituency. They have made a big difference to educational standards in my constituency and that is my local experience of that.” The Tories

The Vickers’ report into banks will land on the Prime Minister’s desk tomorrow. It goes to the banks very early on Monday morning before being published later that day. The thing to watch for is how politicians react to it. We know that the report will propose some kind of ring fence. But what we do not know is how strict the ring fence will be and how quickly Vickers will want it implemented. As Robert Peston says the impact of the ring fence on the banks’ creditworthiness will be felt long before the actual ring fence comes into effect. Intriguingly, Ed Miliband is giving a speech to the TUC

William Hague is an unlikely sort of technophile. Truth be told, for all his strengths he simply does not look like a signed-up member of the Twitterati. His history-dripping, gold-covered office in King Charles Street is about as far away from the internet-enabled Google office as you can get. But the Foreign Secretary has just opened a Facebook profile – and garnered a thousand friends or so in a few days. Ironically, none of his staff can see his family snapshots, his “likes” or who he chooses to poke – as access to Facebook is limited on the Foreign Office IT network. How this foray onto Facebook will end up

The Observer has a cracking scoop: a brief document detailing a new Labour plan to attack Cameron. The memo has been written by Shaun Woodward, the former Tory MP and Labour cabinet minister who now heads Labour’s anti-Tory unit. He will report to the shadow cabinet in the next few weeks. He says: ‘At the last election we faced a Conservative party (and a Conservative leader in David Cameron) whose strategic goal was to decontaminate their brand, intending to present themselves as reformed, modern, centrist and pragmatic. Cameron was effective in promoting a perception [that] his party had changed. But here is the paradox: whilst the Tories made changes before

This morning’s papers have been replete with rumours about Nick Cleg engineering some sort of official investigation into the riots, having brokered a deal between the government and Ed Miliband. Clegg has just delivered his post-riots speech. He ruled out a public inquiry (presumably on grounds of cost), but revealed that Whitehall is “tendering a contract for research” into broken communities: his Victims and Communities Commission. This is a minor victory for Clegg, who has marked his sign on these events, albeit in a wishy-washy way. It is also a limited victory for Ed Miliband, who first initiated talks of an inquiry.