Labour party
What Focus Groups Say About Ed Miliband
If people vote in the general election on 7 May 2015 the way our ComRes opinion poll today suggests, Labour would win a majority of 74 seats. But they probably won’t. So how will public opinion change over the next two years?
Here are two schools of thought: Dan Hodges, my fellow zombie Blairite, has devised [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Sunday, 19 May 2013 at 8:29 pm
Live Well for Less*
We are used to Ed Miliband’s post-neo-liberal mumbo-jumbo on the economy. We heard more of it in his speech to Progress on Saturday (see below). What was surprising, reading David Sainsbury’s book, Progressive Capitalism, is that he too criticises the New Labour government, in which he too was a minister, because it failed to “question fundamentally [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 13 May 2013 at 6:19 pm
One Nation Labour would look after the rich
Philip Collins has a superb column in The Times today (pay wall), which dismantles Ed Miliband’s attempt to substitute a slogan for policy making:
One Nation has a clear meaning in its original Conservative incarnation. To be a One Nation Tory was a retort to the suspicion that, in the battle between the two nations of [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Friday, 19 April 2013 at 2:06 pm
Blair’s Seven Awkward Questions
I see that Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman, has beaten me in trying to answer Tony Blair’s seven questions for the Labour Party (Times, pay wall).
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 15 April 2013 at 2:10 pm
Policy-free, but a good Labour speech
On the day that Ed Miliband, who usually makes content-free speeches, came up with a policy, Jon Cruddas, who is in charge of Labour’s policy, gave a speech that contained no policy. But I thought its tone of Bipartisan Reasonableness was significant:
Personally, I very much welcomed David Cameron when he began to talk about ‘a social [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Thursday, 14 February 2013 at 3:04 pm
The Labour Conference: Chuka Umunna, blagging free food and ‘Loose Women’
The first day of the conference and the rain is pelting. As is usually the case at these events, it is held on the outside of the city centre in a wilderness of roundabouts and dual carriage ways. I wander lost, feeling like I’m in the opening sequence of some grim exploitation film about inner city crime.
By Grainne Maguire | Notebook, Opinion | Monday, 1 October 2012 at 12:01 pm
“I was definitely right”
There is a growing conventional wisdom that Ed Miliband’s party conference speech last year about “predators” and “producers”, although it was derided, was ahead of the curve. My good colleague Andrew Grice said in The Independent today says that the speech “was ridiculed at the time but has been vindicated by events”. Less surprisingly, Ed [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Saturday, 15 September 2012 at 5:23 pm
“Westminster is not a real place”: In conversation with Jamie Reed MP
Callum Jones talks to the Labour MP for Copeland about the Department for Health’s new incumbents, class, the looming Corby by-election and that fateful night in Bradford.
By Callum Jones | Notebook, Opinion | Monday, 10 September 2012 at 2:38 pm
The Ed and Ed Show
One or two comrades did not like my article for The Independent on Sunday yesterday, in which I said:
Ed Miliband and Ed Balls have been getting on particularly badly recently, although each has long found the other trying.
This was unsourced sour grapes from a “raging Blairophile”, I was told. (Although the latter compliment came from [...]
By John Rentoul | Eagle Eye | Monday, 27 August 2012 at 10:07 pm
Pre-Chilcot Blair now in full sanitise mode
A few years back, then Labour MP Tony McWalter rose to his feet in a packed House of Commons chamber to ask Tony Blair if he could briefly outline his political philosophy? Unusually for a master of performance Blair was utterly stumped. One explanation for this simple unpicking is that the only honest answer to the question was, and remains: “being the winner”.
By Mark Donne | Notebook, Opinion | Wednesday, 4 July 2012 at 5:29 pm
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