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Wednesday News Review

14/07/2010, 07:35:34 AM

Ed M woos the press

Ed Miliband impressed at press lunch

I have been listening to Labour leadership challenger Ed Miliband wooing a notoriously sceptical audience, members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. And I’m wondering: Is he Labour’s David Cameron? Having observed him giving several impressive party conference speeches in recent years, I’ve noted before that his style is similar: shirt sleeves, no jacket, strolling around the podium, speaking without notes. But now, as Ed Miliband enters the crucial summer period in the Labour leadership contest against his four rivals, he appears to be adopting another Cameron tactic, dumping large parts of party policy. – Sky

Ed Miliband has just emerged from a lunch talk in front of dozens of journalists in the — for a politician — not un-intimidating surroundings of the press gallery restaurant in the House of Commons. Miliband appeared to impress most present with a speech laced with jokes in the first half. One of the most notable of these was when he said that he didn’t need to brief journalists while he was working for Gordon Brown because he “shared an office with the forces of hell”, in a reference to Alistair Darling’s comments about hard-core Brownites who briefed against him in recent years. – The New Statesman

Speaking at a Press Gallery lunch, Mr Miliband said: “I do not begrudge him at all the chance to offer his reflections, because I think he served the party extremely loyally. “What is absolutely clear is that we need to move on as a political party from the culture, methods and ways of that New Labour establishment.” Saying that Lord Mandelson’s book should “close a chapter,” he added: “I believe I am the candidate who can move Labour on.” – The Telegraph

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The David Miliband interview

13/07/2010, 10:37:34 AM

David Miliband: no zombie

Step up David Miliband, the third leadership contender to join us in the Labour Uncut crowdsourcing hotseat. He was bouncy and inquisitive, he had a firm handshake and a busy office. He even let us take his picture, unlike Diane Abbott who only uses ‘approved photography’.

He’s for votes at 16, feels a personal loss at the ‘vandalism’ of BSF, but he’s definitely not a zombie. In fact, he’s very anti-zombie.

Q. (from Luke Spencer) How do you think we can get back the supporters we lost in the election so we can succeed in wining the election in 2015?

A. Well I think we lost because we didn’t relefct people’s aspirations and hopes and second because we didn’t have a clear plan for the future. The way to get it back is to be on people’s side and get a clear plan for the future. We won three elections because people thought we’d make them better off and make their communities safer, improve their schools and hospitals, or their health and education services. And that must be the recipe for the next election if it’s in 2015, or even sooner. I think that involves changing the way we do politics, because that’s an important part of reaching out, but also because it will help us develop the ideas that actually speak to people’s lives as they are today or tomorrow as opposed to what they were ten or fifteen years ago.

Q. (from Joseph Casey) Ken Clarke said last week that in the past politicians have talked tough on crime without taking the tough decisions. Although dominating the headlines and stimulating much debate, I heard no comment on the issue from any of the Labour leadership contenders. What approach do you think is the most effective route to offender rehabilitation, which ultimately creates fewer victims and less crime?

A. We’ve been asked about this quite a lot at the hustings that we’re having. Remember, crime was reduced by 35-40% under Labour. We’re the first government since 1945 to leave office with crime lower than when we arrived. And on reoffending we cut reoffending rates by 20% overall, 24% for young people…but we’ve got to do more, and better, next time. I think that Ken Clarke is having to come into this with his hands tied because he’s got no investment to make rehabilitation work. I would support as he called it the ‘rehabilitation revolution’. The more you can rehabilitate people, the better. And we’ve got to make prison work better. It’s not a case of does prison work or doesn’t prison work. It’s a question of what’s the best way of keeping crime down, because the best test of a penal system is the amount of crime not the number of people in prison. And I think that we can do that in a number of ways. I think that restorative justice is important, where people pay back to their victims. I think we’ve got to make community punishment mean something, because too many people think it’s a soft option. And we started to do that, but we’d have to go further.

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Tuesday News Review

13/07/2010, 07:50:57 AM

The gift that keeps on giving

"Futile"

The leaders of Labour‘s general election campaign believed their party was “fucked” six months before Gordon Brown fired the starting gun in April, Lord Mandelson has revealed. In the latest instalment of his memoirs, the former business secretary says that three senior members of the cabinet joked last October that Labour should fight a campaign based on three Fs: Futile, Finished, and Fucked. – The Guardian

The peer criticised the “unbridled contempt” of some of Mr Brown’s allies – taken as a reference to Mr Whelan and Ed Balls – for Mr Blair. Mr Balls, now a candidate for the party leadership, said yesterday it was incorrect to say he had briefed against fellow Labour MPs over the past decade. In a BBC interview he said: “Are there times when I was in my late 20s, 15 years ago, where… we were sort of youthful and exuberant and a bit arrogant? Almost certainly the case, but we all grew up.” – The Western Mail

"Finished"

Clearly annoyed by Lord Mandelson’s actions, leadership candidate Ed Miliband, who served in cabinet with him, said: “One of the lessons for Labour is we do need to move on from some of the psychodramas of the past, some of the factionalism that there was.” The most important lesson to be learnt from the memoirs, said Mr Miliband, was that the party would be “profoundly wrong” to believe that it lost the election because of its most senior personalities, rather than its policies. “We began as the party of the windfall tax on privatised utilities and the minimum wage in 1997. We ended up – despite doing great things – as the party defending bankers’ bonuses and pushing forward ID cards,” said Mr Miliband. – The Irish Times

"Fucked"

A senior Labour politician has launched a scathing attack on Lord Mandelson, saying the former Cabinet minister should compensate the party for the damage his memoirs are likely to cause. Ian Davidson, the new chairman of the Commons Scottish Affairs Committee, said Mandelson should donate the proceeds from his explosive tell-all memoirs to the party. The MP also said that the television advertisements for the book, in which the former Business Secretary wears a smoking jacket and a cravat, proved he had always been egotistical and self-serving. – The Herald

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Sunday News Review

11/07/2010, 08:39:01 AM

Miliband: amassing an army of supporters

The Leadership

“The Labour Party can only win power again if we win the battle locally. We need an army of activists, trained and ready to take on the coalition. The Con-Dem cuts don’t just threaten the recovery, they threaten the livelihood of every community”. – David Miliband, The Mirror.

“It would be all too easy for Labour leadership candidates to please their natural supporters by accusing the Lib Dems of being collaborators – a word John Prescott used to describe his former colleague John Hutton, advising the Government on pensions – as if we were now living under Nazi occupation. But that risks driving the Lib Dems further into the arms of the Tories.” – The Independent.

“[David] Miliband’s ideas can only become reality if he is elected leader and if Labour wins the next Election. Clegg, in his statement on political and constitutional reform last week, was addressing the Commons as Deputy Prime Minister. One only has to recall the difference between the aura of power of Tony Blair in 1997, and the lack of authority of successive Tory leaders of the Opposition to see how authority has passed from Labour to the Coalition.” – The Daily Mail.

“David Miliband has surpassed himself with the sorriest excuse for a “nothing to do with me, guv” speech we have heard since Gordon Brown’s departure. The shadow foreign secretary, who always strained every sinew to make it look like he supported Brown when he was in office, is now trying to oil out of his support for the doomed Labour government to help his leadership bid.” – The Telegraph.

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The week Uncut

10/07/2010, 06:21:52 PM

Another week in the race is over. As the contest rolled into July, five people said the same things they said last week, to some slightly different people, and one man got ready to say lots of things about two people, which a great many more people will read.

It was the week that Burnham didn’t quit, Balls didn’t smear and Michael Gove broke the hearts of millions of children, enraged thousands of teachers, disappointed hundreds of parents, and made one man very angry indeed.

In case you missed them, here are half a dozen of Uncut’s better-read pieces of the last week:

“It was like looking at bambi. So I shot him.” Watson on the moment he lost it with Gove

Ed Miliband’s taste in music causes an argument in the Uncut office*

Bounder doesn’t think Nick Clegg’s Your Freedom is big or clever

James Ruddick thinks the Tories are storing up glory by trashing our past

Nick Palmer argues Ken Clarke isn’t wrong, he just doesn’t mean it

John Woodcock on Ed Miliband and why he is wrong about flexible labour markets

*By office we mean Starbucks

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Pete Willsman in the Plumstead Badlands IV

10/07/2010, 01:12:21 PM

Latest update on comrade Pete Willsman’s last ditch attempts to get himself validly nominated for this year’s election to Labour’s ruling national executive committee (NEC).

At the Erith & Thamesmead executive committee (EC) last night, Willsman’s Plumstead branch (he still appears on the Erith and Thamesmead membership list, though he has now transferred to Oxford East) moved a resolution for the next general committee (GC) that Erith and Thamesmead’s NEC nominations be reopened. It was defeated.

It was said that Willsman had been branch secretary for 15 years. His recent move to Oxford was not cited. (more…)

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A family story of where Labour went wrong, by Helen Godwin Teige

09/07/2010, 09:36:35 AM

In 1997 my entire family voted for Tony Blair. We were genuinely thrilled as we celebrated the landslide. I was 21 and optimistic after a lifetime of Conservative government.

Fast forward to 2010 and only half of us still gave Labour our vote, with my mother making it very clear that this was their last chance. Interestingly, of the Labour voters, two of us are now members. We both got involved in the election campaign and felt passionately that Labour was the right party, on policy across the board and particularly to get us out of the recession.

But what about the rest of my family; what went wrong? (more…)

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Friday News Review

09/07/2010, 08:27:14 AM

Show me the money

David Miliband has raised more in donations than any of the other candidates

Since launching his bid to replace Gordon Brown in May, accounts issued by the Electoral Commission show that the shadow foreign secretary has raised nearly £200,000 from major donors alone. He has also drawn in 94 smaller gifts of less than £1,500, which do not have to be declared. In contrast, Ed Balls, the shadow education secretary and his nearest rival, has raked in less than £30,000, and Mr Miliband’s younger brother Ed, the shadow energy secretary, has only £15,000. – The Telegraph

Black Country MP John Spellar has offered a donation of £13,000 to Labour leadership candidate Ed Balls’s campaign – but he doesn’t expect ever to pay it. Mr Spellar is listed as a donor in a new register published by the Electoral Commission which shows how much the candidates have received. Shadow Foreign Secretary David Miliband is in the lead in the cash stakes, with £185,265 in financial support from major backers. – The Birmingham Post

David Miliband brandished his political fundraising abilities today as it emerged he had attracted far more in donations to his Labour leadership bid than any of his rivals. The shadow foreign secretary has so far racked up £185,265 in financial support from major backers, according to the Electoral Commission. That is apart from 94 other donations of less than £1,500 which do not need to be declared and two cash gifts from the Usdaw and Community unions which will be listed in future months. – The Guardian

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Tuesday News Review

06/07/2010, 07:34:33 AM

#hustings

David Miliband in action at the Cardiff hustings

Pity the Labour leadership contenders. They have made themselves hoarse on the hustings, but there are still three sweaty months to go. Yet they know they can only be a sideshow at this stage in the post-election cycle, when all eyes are on the coalition. It may be some consolation to the contenders to know they are doing their party some good as recruiting officers. At least 25,000 new members have joined up since Labour’s election defeat, a mixture of returners and disaffected Lib Dems. When ballot papers go out to MPs, trade union supporters and activists on 1 September, newcomers’ votes may have a disproportionate influence. – The Guardian

A common theme was the need to acknowledge that the last Labour Government had not only stopped listening to the public but had stopped listening to the Labour Party’s own members. Ed Miliband in a powerful moment declared that, “I do believe our society is too unequal. The gap between the rich and poor is too wide. That’s why I’m campaigning for a living wage, not just a minimum wage and for action on high pay.” This won the vigorously approval of Lord and Lady Kinnock who sat in the front row keen to champion their chosen candidate. – Western Mail

If ever there was a moment for Labour’s rebirth, this is it. The C2 voters who walked away will bear the brunt of Conservative thrift, the once-Blairite middle classes are contemplating the scrapheap, and Lib Dem supporters are appalled that Nick Clegg has become the Trojan horse for Tory cuts. Yet in the greatest crisis to engulf Britain since the war, Labour seems oddly absent. The people’s party has become a travelling circus in which the five leadership candidates perform at endless hustings and get reacquainted with an electorate that told them to take a running jump. – The Telegraph

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The week Uncut

04/07/2010, 01:44:53 PM

Another busy week for June. The leadership candidates have been racing up and down the country securing endorsements and nominations, consoling England players, cheering on Murray and offering up policy positions on pretty much everything.

In case you missed them, here are half a dozen of Uncut’s better-read pieces of the last week:

Kate Williams gets suckered into facing Nick and Dave

Painter offers his 10 lessons for Labour from England’s hopeless World Cup

Tom Copley wakes up agreeing with Ken Clarke and doesn’t like it

Rachel Reeves argues that we need a growth plan, not regional economic vandalism

Dan Hodges fires off a blistering assault on the new pluralism

Furber gives the candidates and their web campaigns what for

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