Labour party

The former Labour Cabinet Minister, author and long-serving MP Tony Benn has passed away today, aged 88. In 2009, our deputy editor Mary Wakefield interviewed Benn about the financial crisis and the basic decency at the heart of all human beings. Here is the article in full. I’m standing in Tony Benn’s front garden, on my way out but dawdling, reluctant to leave. Once I’m back on my bike I’ll be in Broken Britain again, snarling at the buses. But right now I’m still in Benn-land, where all people are kindly and the future is bright with mutual concern. Even the outside of Benn’s house reflects the decency within. There’s

‘You only offer a referendum if you want to ratify your existing policy,’ a Tory veteran told me this morning while discussing Ed Miliband’s recent referendum announcement. The Tory illustrated his point with reference to the Major government’s row over a proposed referendum on the single currency. He said that the pro-European side of the argument ran from a referendum, fearing that the public would say ‘no’ to EMU. His logic was: there isn’t time to change minds during a referendum campaign, so the public backs the status quo. Leaving aside the matter of whether or not this old Tory’s interpretation of those historical events is correct, his logic suggests that Miliband

Hattie Harman tried to crack Clegg today. The deputy prime minister, standing in for David Cameron, explained carefully that his boss was visiting, ‘Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories.’ Not a title the Israeli Tourist board has got round to using. Hattie wasn’t on her best form. She tried to draw Clegg as a hypocritical house-slave attempting to duck responsibility for his master’s actions. But she plodded through her jibes. Over-rehearsal had killed her hunger to perform. And Clegg met all her accusations with a simple ploy. Blame Labour. It worked every time. On the bedroom tax Clegg had the support of the figures. A million and a half are

Well, yes, Hamish Macdonell is correct. A coherent devo-max option could win the referendum for Unionists. Some of us, ahem, have been arguing that for years. There were, of course, good reasons for insisting that the referendum vote be a simple Yes/No affair. A single question cuts to the heart of the issue and, notionally, should produce a clear outcome. Nevertheless it also greatly increased the risk – or prospect, if you prefer – of a Yes vote. A multi-option referendum would have killed a Yes vote. But if Hamish is correct I am not, alas, so sure the same can be said of Comrades Forsyth and Nelson. James writes

Labour says it is tough on welfare policy. And today, the party launched its tough compulsory jobs guarantee funding pledge by looking tough too. Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves would have made a stronger Mr Steerpike quail in these hard-hitting outfits.

In an interview with The Spectator this week, the Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin admits that HS2 will not have been approved by parliament before the next election. This invites the question, will HS2 become an election issue? Both Ed Balls and Andy Burnham have made forays against HS2 in recent months. But both have been slapped down by Ed Miliband’s office. His allies believe that Labour can’t run on a platform of rebuilding Britain while simultaneously promising to put a stop to the biggest infrastructure project in decades. But one wonders if this Labour position will hold. The Tory election campaign will claim repeatedly that Labour’s sums don’t add up,

So it looks as though Labour is going to go for Number 10 over Patrick Rock’s arrest. Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Jon Ashworth has written to Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood with the following questions about the case: Dear Sir Jeremy, I am writing to you about the arrest last month of the Prime Minister’s senior adviser, Patrick Rock, on allegations concerning child abuse images. On the substance of the allegations themselves, I recognise that Mr Rock has not been charged with any offence, and it is vitally important that the police investigation is able to take its course and that no potential future trial is prejudiced. However, given that Mr

At last – Labour has made its intentions over education clear. Throughout his interview on the Sunday Politics today, Tristram Hunt showed that Labour has switched allegiances to adults, not the pupils. On the side of institutions, not those who use them. Although the shadow education secretary stated he ‘doesn’t want to waste political energy on undoing reforms that, in certain situations, build rather successfully on Labour party policy’, he confirmed his party would not sanction any more free schools: ‘I was in Stroud on Thursday and plans there for a big new style of school in an area where you’ve got surplus places threatened to destroy the viability of

At least when the Conservatives blathered on about chocolate oranges, they had the excuse that Britain was feeling pretty good about itself. Today, the party that brought you the cost-of-gymming crisis has taken up a new campaign which just shows how noble and powerful opposition can be. It’s already being branded Labour’s CostaCoffeeCrisis, but it involves an attack on Waitrose for the heinous crime of offering its customers free coffee. The FT’s Jim Pickard has the story that Labour shadow communities minister Andy Sawford has written to every MP with a local Waitrose asking them to campaign against the offer (which is available through the myWaitrose loyalty scheme, something many

You won’t catch Ed Miliband or David Cameron admitting that their best hope of governing after 2015 is in a coalition or a minority government. But what if their party machines have already decided that this is what’s going to happen anyway? There are secret discussions within the Labour party about scaling back the number of ‘target seats’ (the seats that it will pour the most resources into in order to win – full list here) from the official list of 106 to 80, or even just 60, which means that some in Labour think it is better to aim to be the largest party rather than out-and-out victory. I

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman on why the two party political system is dying” startat=1207] Listen [/audioplayer]Two things will make the next general election campaign quite unlike any previous election in this country. The first is that we now have four-party politics right across Britain. In Scotland and Wales, the nationalist parties have been a political force for a generation. But the big change is in England, where Ukip is emerging as a fourth force. Second, the campaign will be haunted by the spectre of another hung parliament. The question of what happens if no party wins an overall majority will be asked time and time again by

Go to war with the Daily Mail at your peril: Ed Miliband did it over its ‘the man who hated Britain’ column and now perhaps the Labour party is seeing the revenge for that with the paper’s ongoing insistence that Harriet Harman apologise for the National Council for Civil Liberties’ links to the Paedophile Information Exchange in the 1970s. Harman, though, is going to war with the Mail again, and her supporters in the press are arguing that the paper is on thin moral ground here. Harman’s messy handling of the story has kept it going as much as anything else. She gave a forceful interview to Newsnight yesterday in