Author: |Posted: 12:04 pm on 05/10/09
Category: Snowblog
It’s clearly not the Brighton train – at least, not the one I caught to Labour this time last week. This is unmistakably the Virgin tipping train to Manchester.
It may be 6.17 in the morning, but the differences are palpable. There’s a lot of Louis Vuitton bags aboard. More Dell than Apple. The overall presentation is more quaffed, more Jacqmar. More tied around the throat… clean, dull, more white-shirted (like me, I suppose – well, if you leave out the tie). read more
Author: |Posted: 7:12 pm on 30/09/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
The IFS has helped me out with a bit of rough, heavily caveated number-crunching based on what Gordon Brown said yesterday about cuts.
Yes, he didn’t say much, but he did say he wanted to protect rises in the minimum wage, rises in child tax credits, hospitals, schools and police numbers. And he said he would get the international aid budget to the target of 0.7 per cent of GDP.
Just factor in a few of those commitments – freezing the schools and NHS budgets (the closest we can get to a “hospitals” budget), growing the aid budget – and other budgets would have to be squeezed by something like 6 per cent a year or nearly 18 per cent over three years. read more
Author: |Posted: 11:40 am on 30/09/09
Category: Snowblog
The Sun’s associate editor, Trevor Kavanagh has confirmed that Rupert Murdoch was central to the Sun’s decision to switch horses in British politics.
Should we care? read more
Author: |Posted: 9:24 am on 30/09/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
The Sun’s declaration of support for David Cameron is a carefully timed missile aimed at knocking out any possible positive impact that the PM’s speech might have had – in short, doing its best to ensure that this Murdoch paper is where it always wants to be, on the winning side.
No.10 could see that a Cameron endorsement was coming down the tracks but coming last night, with lethal timing, lethal intent, it really hurt. You could see some of that on the Prime Minister’s face in a couple of his breakfast round of interviews on TV this morning, but he was also being harried quite a bit – actually, more than I can remember seeing in UK politics in recent times.
Author: |Posted: 3:48 pm on 29/09/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
You know things aren’t tickety boo when a leader’s speech opens and closes with a plea not to give up. Think big and fight hard, Gordon Brown said.
The fight will follow, did he think big?
New defining policies in an age of little cash are difficult and this speech underlines that. It also comes at the end of a Parliament so promises are mostly manifesto ones not Queen’s Speech 2009 ones. read more
Author: |Posted: 3:32 pm on 29/09/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
What of Gordon Brown’s commitment to a referendum in the first year of a new Labour government? Just for the record: if AV (alternative voting) had been used in the 2005 general election it would have given Labour an even bigger majority – 86 seats rather than 64 on Electoral Reform Society projections.
In 1997, the party would have won a 213 majority rather than a 179 majority.
This is not what the Liberal Democrats were looking for and several Labour ministers, including two I spoke to today who are Cabinet ministers, will be disappointed that a moment they thought might be seized for major constitutional change has been missed.
The policy of the Labour Party appears to have shifted from support of the first past the post system for general elections to AV without so much as a meeting of political Cabinet to look it over. read more
Author: |Posted: 3:06 pm on 29/09/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
Gordon Brown is trying to show us the chasm between Labour and the Conservatives by showing a bit of ankle on the Pre-Budget Report.
Labour would not cut support for schools, hospitals and police, he says. That’s a very tricky promise to pin down. He’s not saying he’ll protect the entire schools department or any of the other departments.
There are also commitments to protect Sure Start, the minimum wage planned increases, and the international aid 0.7 per cent of overall spend target.
Working out what that means for the other budgets is pretty well impossible without more detail but it means defence, transport, any number of other Cinderellas, get less of the cake.
Alistair Darling has asked for the PBR papers to be ready for end October but it’s not decided yet whether the actual PBR will be then or the end of November.
Author: |Posted: 1:30 pm on 29/09/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
Peter Mandelson’s speech was all the talk of the fringe last night. l interviewed him at a fringe meeting this morning and he insisted he didn’t do “pantomime”. I resisted the inclination to say “OH YES YOU DO!”
One Cabinet minister last night said the speech was a “Gaddafi-like” indulgence.
A couple of others I’ve spoken to thought it a pretty irrelevant internal therapy session for the delegates.
Another Cabinet minister said he thought it would be a positive turn-off for voters.
But the real story comes later, the PM’s speech after lunch. read more
Author: |Posted: 5:29 pm on 28/09/09
Category: Snowblog
Few of us thought we’d live to see the day when a Labour party conference would rise as one to their feet in a standing ovation for Peter Mandelson. But today they did.
Of course, we have seen it before – when Michael Heseltine did the same for the improbable electoral prospects of John Major.
Author: |Posted: 3:01 pm on 28/09/09
Category: Gary Gibbon on Politics
Not many Cabinet ministers get wolf whistled as they go to the podium. But Peter Mandelson is no ordinary Cabinet minister.
He is talking about himself as he starts his speech… about what drew him back.
It’s enormously self-confident and self-referential. They appear to have pushed him down the running order to make sure the hall filled up.
It has now filled up a bit… very nearly full… and he’s getting a huge amount of applause.
At the Labour conference, but where is everyone?
Unexpected question for Gordon Brown
Where next for the unions at conference?
