Labour party

Michael Gove, the most important and successful Aberdonian politician since, well, since I don’t know actually, is also that rarest of things: a grown-up cabinet minister. He knows the importance of praise. Consider this passage – highlighted by John Rentoul – from a speech he gave on Child Protection this morning: Just as the Labour Government early in its life felt that teachers needed to be told how to operate – down to the tiniest detail of what should happen in every literacy or numeracy hour – so the Labour Government towards the end of its life felt it had to produce thousands of pages of central Government prescription on

Tom Watson’s Twitter feed has gone a bit quiet recently. Strange, as he is normally quite vocal about media ethics and their failings. But his silence is well-judged: when he stood up in PMQs and referred to a ‘a powerful pedophile network linked to Parliament and Number 10’ and referred to ‘senior aide of a former Prime Minister’ he started a massive and tawdry guessing game, just as the Newsnight investigation did. And was his evidence any stronger? Harriet Harman has just been asked on BBC Sunday Politics, and she didn’t know. For those who missed it, here’s Watson’s PMQs intervention: listen to ‘Tom Watson’s allegations in PMQs’ on Audioboo

Team Cameron, as my colleague James Forysth points out, are rather pleased with Obama’s victory. Downing Street’s finest have been pushing the idea that Barack Obama’s victory speech echoed, word for word, Cameron’s constant refrain that ‘we are all in this together’ and that the ‘inherited economic mess’ is slowly being overcome. Dave the Statesman, don’t you know? Obama has his admirers on the Opposition benches, as we know. The Labour Party was out in force at the two biggest victory bashes in central London last night: CNN’s opulent shindig at One Mayfair and the tackier affair at the US Embassy. I spotted Mr and Mrs Harriet Harman, Chris Bryant

Ed Miliband’s One Nation circus moves on to tackle low pay this week, with the Labour leader calling for more companies to pay their staff the Living Wage of at least £7.20 an hour. One of his most striking proposals comes from the Resolution Foundation’s Commission on Living Standards, which is to force top companies to publish details of what proportion of their staff are paid below the living wage. Though Miliband isn’t hinting at raising the statutory minimum wage to meet the living wage – clearly acknowledging the adverse impact that this hike could have on job creation when the economy remains so fragile – he still wants to

There’s no such thing as a safe seat in a by-election as Bradford West demonstrated. But it would still be a major shock if Labour lost Rotherham, a seat they’ve held since 1933. But the three by-elections coming up after Corby—Middlesborough, Croydon North and, now, Rotherham—will test how much Labour has learnt from the Bradford West experience. In all three seats, Labour has a large majority and no obvious challenger. Respect are already trying to repeat their by-election success, selecting Lee Jasper—the former Ken Livingstone adviser and chair of the London Race and Criminal Justice Consortium—in Croydon North. Respect have already declared that he’ll be ‘targeting‘ black voters. In Middlesborough, the

Cutting the EU budget is a very good idea. Much of it is spent inefficiently and its priorities are all wrong, 40 percent of it goes on agriculture. Given that a cut would also be popular with voters, why doesn’t David Cameron propose one? The reason is that there’s virtually no chance of getting agreement to it. If there’s no agreement, the EU will move to annual budgets decided by qualified majority voting—stripping Britain of its veto. But Labour’s tactical positioning in calling for an EU budget cut has been, as Isabel said earlier, extremely clever. It has left Cameron defending a complicated position which puts him on the wrong

To be fair to Kevin Brennan, he seems to have updated his attack line on Michael Gove since his ‘don’t-call-teachers-names’ press release that Labour sent out overnight. The party’s shadow education minister is now attacking the Education Secretary for inconsistency, arguing that his announcement today on improving teacher training contradicts the decision to allow academies and free schools to employ unqualified teachers. He has just told BBC News: ‘But what’s rather strange about what the Government is doing is at the same time it’s saying there should be more rigour in the testing of teachers as they go in to the profession, it’s saying more and more schools can hire

A large part of the Tory message at the next election will be ‘don’t let Labour ruin the economy again’. One of the things that will help the Tories make this a topic of the campaign is Ed Balls’s constant desire to defend the record of the last Labour government. As Jonathan noted earlier, when Andrew Neil pointed out that Labour was — contrary to Balls’s earlier denials — running a structural deficit in 2007, Balls got into a long-winded attempt to justify both that and his denial of this point last year.

Whether or not he did accidentally suggest that he knew what tomorrow’s GDP figures will be at Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron did have a jolly good point about the way Labour responds to good news on the economy. He told Ed Miliband: ‘It’s only a bad week if you think it’s bad that unemployment’s coming down, it’s only a bad week if you regret inflation coming down… every piece of good news sends that team into a complete decline, well, I can tell him, the good news will keep on coming.’ As Fraser blogged at the weekend, Ed Miliband’s strategy is predicated on the government continually cocking up. It’s

The first Prime Minister’s Questions after the conference season is more important than most: the House and the press gallery are looking to see who has come back with a spring in their step. But today’s session has an added element to it: the Andrew Mitchell factor. Labour attempted to have a go at the chief whip at Home Office questions on Monday. But with the Chamber only half full, it fell a bit flat. Today, though, the House will be packed and Ed Miliband’s party will be out for blood. I expect Mitchell himself will deal with it quite resolutely. Friends say that the iron has entered his soul

Just as Ed Miliband seemed to get a poll bounce from his conference speech last week, so David Cameron seems to have got one from his on Wednesday. On YouGov’s question of who would make the best Prime Minister, Cameron has extended his lead to 14 points. That more than reverses the bump Miliband got on that question from his conference (he had closed the gap from 12 points before the conferences to just four last week). In fact, it’s the best result for Cameron on that crucial question since the Budget in March. On voting intention, the Tories’ conference does seem to have helped them close the gap to

British politics is returning to normal. The two-party system is back. That, it seems to me, is the chief conclusion to be drawn from this year’s conference season*. The opposition have been supplanted by Labour and we’re back to the familiar sight of watching the Conservatives and Labour knock lumps out of one another. It is not just that the Lib Dem conference seems to have taken place months ago (though it’s partly that) but that the guest list for the next general election has been agreed and Nick Clegg’s party isn’t on it. The Liberal Democrats? Who they? For a long time now, the government has been weakened by the

Iain Duncan Smith has just delivered the most political speech of what has been a highly partisan conference. He tore into Labour’s record on welfare, accusing them of having fostered welfare dependency and increased inequality. He said that they had created two nations: one who worked and one who was trapped on welfare. Having done that, he then denounced Labour for having opposed all of his changes to the welfare system, attacking them in moral terms for this. Labour ‘don’t know anything about work do they’ he told the audience to cheers. The flip side of this attack on Labour was an attempt to claim the mantle of ‘social reform’