Poll boost for Labour
Ed Miliband ends his first week as Labour leader with his party ahead of the Tories in a Guardian/ICM poll for the first time since Gordon Brown ducked the chance of holding an election in 2007. But the two-point lead is the result of a slump in Conservative support rather than any surge in Labour backing and the poll suggests voters are giving Miliband a wary rather than an enthusiastic welcome. The results will offer him a morale boost at the end of a tumultuous week but they also suggest that many Labour supporters are yet to see their new leader as a potential prime minister, and that his brother David might have attracted more support in the short term. – The Guardian
There’s a new ICM poll in the Guardian which once again is showing a very different picture of public opinion from that which we see in the News International daily poll by YouGov. The shares are with changes on last month CON 35 (-2): LAB 37 (nc): LD 18 (nc). The Lib Dems will be relieved that the pollster that came top in the general election polling accuracy table should have them at levels which are markedly different from the daily polls. Yes support is down since the 23.6% at the general election but the fall-off in support has apparently been halted. – Political Betting
Positioning Ed
In eschewing ideological politics for the politics of values, it is not so much JFK that Miliband is invoking but Robert Kennedy: yes, the younger brother. And the red thread that runs through the values argument is not the Socialist argument of Ralph Miliband, the Jewish immigrant Marxist father of the brothers, but rather a strain of radical Catholicism that also ran through Robert Kennedy’s late political framework. For a politician who will need to confront both the hegemony and destructive immorality of the world political-economic order as well the furious, defeated neo-liberal wing of his own Party, this is a clever stance, and it might just win the day for Ed Miliband. – The Huffington Post
