Labour party

Monday

Tarek S Arab

Hormone ‘halves risk of premature birth,’ says the Mail. But its report is wildly inaccurate

As a gynaecologist, I was appalled to read this story about a supposedly ‘groundbreaking’ treatment to stop premature births in the Mail (I read it on the online Mail site but in fact the culprit is The Mail on Sunday). Let me quote from it before telling you what it gets utterly wrong. Note my emphases in bold: A hormone treatment that can help prevent premature births could be made more widely available to thousands of at-risk mothers-to-be. The groundbreaking treatment, not yet widely available on the NHS, sees women given a daily dose of progesterone. This is dubbed the ‘pregnancy hormone’ by doctors, and levels naturally rise during pregnancy to

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Labour must understand that Unite is its enemy

Imagine you are a Labour MP or a trade union official surveying Britain this week. The following points will strike you: Labour has just lost an election it could have won, in part because Unite helped impose a useless leader on it in Ed Miliband and an equally incoherent programme, which failed to convince millions of voters to rid themselves of a mediocre Tory government. Poverty and inequality are everywhere growing in part because of the shocking failure of the trade union movement to come to the aid of the new working class. In the care, hospitality and private security industries and in the shopping, leisure and call centres that

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Harriet Harman: Labour needs to let the public in

How does the Labour party recover? Harriet Harman set out how it will try to come back from its latest election defeat in a speech this morning which told the party to listen to the customer because the customer is always right. Her basic pitch was that just like a product or a shop or a magazine, it’s more important to work out what people want to buy, rather than what you want to sell or write because your own tastes might not be particularly representative of the market that’s out there. To that end, she told the audience that ‘as we conduct this debate, as we elect our leader

Sebastian Payne

Len McCluskey and the trade unions need Labour as much as the party needs them

Can Labour’s links with trade unions survive the leadership contest? This morning, Harriet Harman will outline in a speech at Labour HQ how the new party leader will be elected — and she will say the unions won’t be deciding who it is: ‘We will have strict rules to ensure there is a level playing field for each one of the candidates. Last time the unions communicated directly with many of their members, sending them ballot papers with accompanying material only mentioning one candidate. There will be none of that this time. The Electoral Reform Society will send out individual ballot papers to each member of the electorate.’ ‘The winner

Sunday

Molly Guinness

The next Labour leader should remember the ‘politics of envy’ never work

Andy Burnham may be the trade unions’ favourite candidate for Labour leader but he is already distancing himself from some of Ed Miliband’s worst populist nonsense. This is what he said in today’s Observer: ‘We have got to get away from things that look like symbolism. I am going to put the mansion tax in that category. I am not saying it was necessarily completely the wrong thing to do, but in its name I think it spoke to something that the public don’t particularly like, which is the politics of envy.’ In a 1911 article entitled An Unenvious People, The Spectator paid tribute to the nature of Englishmen. The

Saturday

Sebastian Payne

Jim Murphy resigns as Scottish Labour leader and condemns Len McCluskey

Jim Murphy is quitting Scottish Labour. After only narrowly surviving a vote of no confidence from the party’s executive this morning, Murphy announced that after a ‘terrible election defeat’, he will still tender his resignation in a month’s time. As well as acknowledging Scottish Labour’s terrible performance in the general election, Murphy opened both barrels at Len McCluskey and Unite the Union, who he blames for some of the party’s troubles in Scotland: ‘I know in the past few days, I’ve been at the centre of a campaign by the London leadership of Unite the Union and they’re blaming myself for myself and the Scottish Labour party for the defeat

Friday

Ross Clark

The simple test Labour’s next leader must pass

With Chuka Umunna out, the choice for Labour party members is simple. If they want to win the next election they will choose Liz Kendall as their next leader. There is a very simple test for suitability for the job: their reply to the question ‘did the last Labour government spend too much money?’ Kendall is the only one who has passed. On yesterday’s Newsnight she was straightforward: yes, Labour did spend too much. Yvette Cooper, by contrast, said on Radio 4 this morning: ‘I think there were things that we were spending wrongly on, there were issues that we would have been spending money, too much money on –

Steerpike Steerpike

Chuka Umunna will no longer be the ‘English Obama’

Chuka Umunna has surprised many today with the news that he has withdrawn from the race for the Labour leadership. Explaining his decision he said that the ‘added level of pressure’ had not been a ‘comfortable experience’. Mr S can already hear the sighs from the many Chuka supporters who had seen him as the man to make Labour a pro-business party once more. Earlier this week the business entrepreneur James Caan, who is Chairman of the UK Government’s Start Up Loans Scheme, had confided to Mr S at the Quercus Biasi Foundation Spring Gala at Claridges, that he would support Chuka. He went on to say that he could be the ‘English Obama’: ‘I think

Thursday

Toby Young

Why I still have a deep attachment to the BBC

After I failed my O-levels and decided to leave school, my father suggested I go to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I’m not sure why he thought this would cure me of my self-righteous adolescent narcissism, but it worked. I returned to England determined to go back to school and make something of myself. I very nearly didn’t come back. The first kibbutz I went to was on the Israeli-Lebanese border and about a week after I arrived it was targeted by a group of Palestinian rebels. Katyusha rockets rained down from all sides and the other guest workers and I were ushered into a special air-raid shelter reserved

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 14 May 2015

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, soon got used to the surprise of the Conservatives being returned in the general election with a majority of 12. He retained George Osborne as Chancellor of the Exchequer and made him First Secretary of State too. Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Michael Fallon and Iain Duncan Smith also stayed put, but Chris Grayling replaced William Hague, who had left the Commons, as Leader of the House, to be replaced as justice secretary by Michael Gove, who was replaced as chief whip by Mark Harper. Amber Rudd became Energy Secretary. John Whittingdale became Culture Secretary in place of Sajid Javid, who became Business Secretary. Boris

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Goulash and whiplash

Ed is a plank. He was always a plank — and now he is in Ibiza being a plank. Plankety–plankety-plank: goodbye to our most recent terrible leader — and who will be the next? I, meanwhile, am in the Gay Hussar, choking on my own grief, hearing ‘Crying in the Rain’, weirdly, in my head, trying to forget the images that flicker mercilessly across my eyes, disrupting my view of a book that says, in capital letters, for emphasis — tony blair (now that’s a leader, eh!) — Clegg, dry-eyed with realisation at the breadth of his failure, Ed Balls hauled down like an -Easter Island statue, Samantha Cameron’s victory

Sebastian Payne

Podcast: the end of Miliband and the Tories’ one nation challenge

Ed Milband and his team were not ready for their major defeat on election night. On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Dan Hodges discusses the final days of Miliband’s leadership with Andrew Harrop of the Fabian Society. What were the majority mistakes of the Labour campaign? Was vital polling information about his seat kept from Ed Balls? Will Labour be able to regenerate into a party ready to govern within five years? Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth also discuss the first week of the new Conservative government and the challenges facing David Cameron. Few in the Tory party were expecting a majority, so how will the ideological vacuum be filled?

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The three groups of voters that Labour needs to win back

Labour is in a more difficult position now than it was after its defeat in 1992. In ’92, the electorate had sent Labour a clear message: move to the centre, don’t say you’ll put up taxes and get a better leader. But this time round, the message Labour has been sent is more complicated. There are three groups of voters that Labour failed with at this election, I argue in the magazine this week. Aspirational voters who went Tory, the left behind working class who went Ukip in England and SNP in Scotland and Nationalist-minded ones north of the border. What the Labour leadership candidates have to explain is how

Ian Fleming

If I were prime minister, by Ian Fleming

This article was first published in The Spectator on 9 October, 1959. I am a totally non-political animal. I prefer the name of the Liberal Party to the name of any other and I vote Conservative rather than Labour, mainly because the Conservatives have bigger bottoms and I believe that big bottoms make for better government than scrawny ones. I only once attended a debate in the House of Commons. It was, I think, towards the end of 1938 when we were unattractively trying to cajole Mussolini away from Hitler. I found the hollowness and futility of the speeches degrading and infantile and the well-fed, deep-throated ‘hear, hears’ for each mendacious

Simon Hart

Pandering to animal rights extremists will get MPs rejected, not elected

The reasons why England and Wales voted so convincingly for a Conservative Government on Thursday will be debated forever, but one of the most obvious is the complete rejection of both Labour and Liberal Democrats in any constituency that has a hint of the countryside about it. This is graphically illustrated by the post-election constituency map. Actually, suggesting that the voters rejected those parties is probably the wrong way round. The truth is that those parties have rejected rural voters. In 2015 Labour’s policy offer to the countryside was little more than a series of threats about everything from gun ownership to badger culling and extraordinarily the Liberal Democrats, despite

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Memo to David Aaronovitch: we’re not all metrosexual now

Still inside that bubble, David Aaronovitch informs us that, regardless of the election result, we are all of a metrosexual mindset, whatever that is. Like it or not, the country as a whole is becoming ‘more like’ London. This was written in response to the slings and arrows flung at Labour for neglecting its northern, English, working-class base – something I’ve been banging on about for at least fifteen years (and perhaps until now to no avail whatsoever). I think David ought to shift his fat arse and get out a bit more. There has always been a deep resistance to and suspicion of the identity politics and race-obsession of

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Labour must estrange its awful voters

And so now we have to suffer the epic delusions, temper tantrums and hissy fits of the metro-left. They simply cannot believe how you scumbags could have got it so wrong last Thursday, you morons. You vindictive, selfish morons. That has been the general response from all of the people, the liberal middle-class lefties, who have cheerfully contributed towards making the once great Labour party effectively unelectable. You lot voted Tory out of fear — because you are stupid, stupid people. The Conservatives ran a ‘negative’ campaign and, because you are either simply horrible human beings, or just thick, you fell for it. That’s been the subtext of most of the

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Making Labour work

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thelastdaysofmiliband/media.mp3″ title=”Dan Hodges and Andrew Harrop discuss the final days of Miliband” startat=34] Listen [/audioplayer]The Labour party is in a worse position today than after its defeat in 1992. Then, the electorate sent Labour a clear and simple message: move to the centre, don’t say you’ll put taxes up and select a more prime ministerial leader. This time, the voters have sent the party a series of messages, several of which are contradictory. The reasons Labour failed to win Swindon South are very different from why it lost Morley and Outwood and the reasons for that defeat are different again in Scotland, where almost all seats fell to the

Dan Hodges

Miliband’s downfall

Ed Miliband was writing his victory speech on election night when the nation’s broadcasters announced the exit poll. He remained convinced — as he had been all along — that he was destined for No.10. In his defence, most people in Westminster thought the same. But within his ranks, a rebellion had already broken out. At 2 p.m. that afternoon, a member of his shadow cabinet had resigned — fearing not defeat, but the debacle that would follow Miliband’s success. ‘I was being briefed by Ed’s team about their post-election plans,’ the shadow minister told me. ‘It was nuts. They were explaining how there would be “no concessions”, no “tacking

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Having a leader won’t solve all of Labour’s problems

The Labour party has decided on a medium-length campaign to elect its new leader, the Press Association reports, with the announcement on 12 September. This is slightly odd, given NEC members were still on their way to the meeting where they’ll vote on the timetable, but there you go. If that date is approved, it is a halfway house between the short campaign that some were arguing would stop the party from descending into lengthy navel-gazing while the Tories got away with introducing policies that weren’t properly scrutinised by the Opposition, and the long campaign that the unions wanted so they could sign up more members – and that some of