Labour party

It is great to be here in Battersea with you today. Last Friday, I was in my constituency, at the local Citizens Advice Bureau. And I talked to some people who had been preyed upon by payday lenders. There was a woman there in floods of tears. She was in work. But she took out a payday loan for her deposit so she could rent somewhere to live. And then disaster followed. A payday loan of a few hundred pounds became a debt of thousands of pounds. She still faces bullying, harassment and threats from multiple payday lenders. Like the young mum I met who described sitting at home with

Will Ed Miliband’s pledge on the Living Wage, made in today’s Independent on Sunday, work? Actually, that’s not really the most important question: the experience of the weeks following the autumn conference season is that you don’t actually need a workable pledge to be able to set the terms of debate. The Labour leader’s plan is for private and public sector employers to receive a tax rebate – on average £445, but up to £1,000 – for 12 months for every employee whose pay is lifted to living wage level of £7.45 an hour. He says this will be paid directly through increased tax and national insurance receipts. The big

One of the odd things about the polls at the moment is that the Tories lead on economic competence and leadership, traditionally the two most important issues, yet trail overall. There are, I argue in the column this week, three possible explanations for this polling paradox. The first possibility is that Ed Miliband is right, that the link between GDP growth and voters’ living standards is broken. A consequence of this is that voters put less emphasis on economic management in the round. Instead, they want to know which party will do most to help them with their cost of living. Then, there’s the possibility that the traditional political rules

It was quite strange yesterday that Michael Gove’s allies were quite so happy to concede ahead of his first proper scrap with Tristram Hunt that it was going to be a tough fight. They’d never given Stephen Twigg quite so much credit, although the complications of the Al-Madinah free school row and Nick Clegg’s wibbling and wobbling over qualified teachers have made life a little more difficult for team Gove. But the strategy was partly to add to the expectations on the new Shadow Education Secretary, and then to bring them crashing down when he actually appeared. This was of course rather high-risk given Hunt is a pretty impressive performer,

Yesterday marked the first reasonably good day that agitators for HS2 have had in a while. Northern business leaders started the day with a call to David Cameron to hold firm on the project, followed by Labour leader of Birmingham City Council Sir Albert Bore warning Labour of ‘protracted public conflict’ in the run-up to the general election if it continued to ‘put out such a negative message on HS2’. This morning’s Guardian story that Labour will support HS2 provided the project’s chairman Sir David Higgins is given the power to bring down its costs appears to be damage limitation. But party sources are today rowing back from that line,

Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was on today’s Daily Politics, gushing with pride that his son Will is Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for the seat of Rossendale and Darwen in Lancashire. Yet it seems that this piece of dynastic info was news to Auntie. Will Straw was on the BBC News Channel this morning, discussing energy prices, and there was no mention of his being a PPC. The presenter simply said, ‘Will Straw is Associate Director of the centre-left think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research.’ Mr S would have forgiven the presenter had he not asked: ‘the Labour Party is talking about a freeze on energy prices for two years. Would you

Tristram Hunt is on a crusade — to find Labour an education strategy. In today’s Daily Mirror, the new shadow education secretary takes a punt by offering up some fresh ideas, including a pledge to bring back the Education Maintenance Allowance for 16 to 19 year olds in further education. When it was canned in 2011, the EMA scheme had an annual budget of £560 million so how would Labour fund its return? By cutting back winter fuel allowance from rich pensioners: ‘Mr Hunt also wants to bring back the Education Maintenance Allowance to help teenagers from the poorest backgrounds stay in education. This could be paid for by stripping

It is a shame that we will be losing Jack Straw at the next election. He has just announced his attention to stand down from a seat he has occupied for more than 30 years. I always rather liked him. He seemed – you know – sort of human, and his instincts were usually right, certainly over Iraq, even if he did cave in. So, we might add, did the majority of the country cave, at the time, under that welter of disinformation. He was misled as everybody was. He once came into the Today prog when I was still editor and, in the Green Room, I mentioned to him

The coalition wants this week to be all about the GDP figures, out on Friday. As I say in the Mail on Sunday, Downing Street is confident that they’ll show the economy is continuing to grow at a relatively decent clip and is already working out how to make political out of that. They have, as Simon Walters reports, already prepared a video mocking Labour’s claims that the coalition’s polices would lead to a million more people on the dole. Ed Miliband’s circle expects that the GDP numbers will again be positive. But they take the view that as long as prices are increasing faster than wages, squeezing voters’ living