Quality | 2010.08.31
Politics live blog - Tuesday 31 August
Rolling coverage of all today\'s political developments from Westminster and beyond
12.26pm: Polly Toynbee\'s 15-minute video interview with David Miliband, which has been posted on our website today , covers a lot of ground in a lively way. Miliband adopts a relatively combative tone, which seems to work quite well. Here\'s an example.
PT: You\'ve warned about no return to Labour\'s comfort zone ... You refer to 1994 and 1997 as if they were the glory days. Isn\'t it time really to--
DM: Polly, Polly, Polly ... I mean, we did win three elections. The 1980s certainly weren\'t the glory days for my constituents in South Shields.
12.15pm: Andy Burnham has told the BBC that he is "in a strong third position and gaining ground" in the Labour leadership contest.
12.00pm: While we\'re on the subject of polls, Lib Dem Voice has sent me the results of a survey of party attitudes towards the coalition. Around 600 Lib Dem members took part. The full results don\'t seem to be on the website yet , but here are some of the key findings.
• 84% of Lib Dem members support being in coalition with the Conservatives , with just 11% opposed - exactly the same as in July.
• 71% of Lib Dem members expect the coalition to last a full parliament .
• 84% of Lib Dem members reject any suggestion of an electoral arrangement with the Conservatives at the next general election .
Stephen Tall, co-editor of Lib Dem Voice, sent me this comment.
Our survey suggests that the vast majority of Lib Dem party members are still fully behind the coalition with the Conservatives, and very supportive of Nick Clegg as leader. This is because the majority believe that a \'significant part\' of the Lib Dem manifesto promises are being implemented in government. There are, though, some warning signs for the Lib Dem leadership in these findings. Most notably, that four out of five Lib Dem members say the biggest immediate danger the party faces is failing to communicate how Lib Dem policies are making a big enough difference in government.
11.47am: YouGov is polling virtually every day now for News International. The results don\'t get much media attention, because they don\'t change very dramatically, but they\'re worth monitoring. The latest figures are here (pdf). The Tories are on 41%, Labour 37% and the Lib Dems 13%. YouGov also asked various questions about the performance of the government and about the economy. The coalition\'s ratings are still broadly positive, but one finding is particularly worrying for David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Asked how their financial situation was likely to change over the next 12 months, only 10% of respondents said it would get better. Some 56% said it would get worse.
11.29am: I am compiling a Labour leadership catch-up reading list, with a few of the best articles about the campaign that have appeared over the last few weeks. If you can think of anything you think I should include, please mention it in the comments.
11.24am: According to PoliticsHome (subscription), Alan Johnson has said that David Miliband, like Jose Mourinho, is "the special one". This is what the shadow home secretary told Radio 5 Live.
David has an experience, he has an eloquence and he has a capacity to put very complicated issues into very simple words and I think that is doing him proud. He stands for equality, greater equality, the irradication of poverty, he stands for a fairer society.
11.15am: More about David Cameron. No 10 says that he is going to continue his paternity leave this week, and that he is not expected to be back at work until next Tuesday (which will be a fortnight after the birth of his baby daughter).
11.13am: A spokesman for Ed Miliband has responded to Ed Balls\'s comment about Miliband and the living wage (see 10.01am). The spokesman said that although there was not a living wage at the energy department, Miliband fought hard to get a living wage for all government departments into Labour\'s election manifeso and that, if Labour had won, energy and all other Whitehall departments would have moved towards paying a living wage.
10.50am: Here, as usual, is a roundup of the more interesting political stories and articles from today\'s papers, in addition to the two that I mentioned earlier (the FT on Treasury cuts and that Times on Britain and France sharing their aircraft carriers - see 8.47am).
You can also read all today\'s Guardian political stories on our website here and all yesterday\'s Guardian political stories, including some that appear in today\'s paper, here .
• Gordon Brown uses an article in the Independent to appeal for Britain to fund food aid to Niger.
• Kevin Schofield in the Sun claims Tony Blair\'s memoirs, which are out tomorrow, will contain a "vicious attack" on Gordon Brown\'s record.
A source who has seen the book told the Sun: "Tony makes it clear he thinks Gordon could have won the election if he hadn\'t turned his back on New Labour."Raising the top rate of tax and planning to put up National Insurance were things he would never have done.
"He thinks the party went back to being old Labour in the eyes of voters, who punished them at the ballot box."
• The Financial Times says that Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, and Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, have impressed the Treasury with their willingness to cut their departmental budgets. (Subscription)
• Gideon Rachman in the FT says that hatred of Tony Blair is over the top, that in 20 years\' time Britons will look back on the Blair era with "considerable nostalgia" and that, although Blair probably made the wrong decision on Iraq, it was not solely his fault.
The decision to back the invasion was not an isolated act of Blair-inspired lunacy. It reflected the conventional wisdom of the British political establishment.
It is clear, in retrospect, that, after easy military victories in Kosovo and Bosnia, Mr Blair became dangerously complacent about the risks of military action in Iraq. But he was hardly alone in his misjudgment. The years after the Kosovo war were the heyday of liberal interventionism on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the political spectrum – fed by guilt at the west\'s reluctance to intervene in Rwanda and the Balkans.
• Philip Stephen in the FT defends civil servants.
Ministers are forever saying public servants should behave more like their counterparts in the world of commerce. They must give up their privileged pension entitlements because "there is nothing like them in the private sector". But woe betide the top civil servant who imagines he or she can behave like a business executive.
• William Hague in an article in the Daily Telegraph says human rights are key to British foreign policy.
"We cannot have a foreign policy without a conscience," he writes.
• The Independent publishes a guide to prime ministerial memoirs , going back to Asquith\'s, which revealed that Lloyd George was "all for peace" in 1914.
10.30am: More on the Kinnock/Mandelson feud (see 8.47am and 9.33am). As well as writing to the Times, Kinnock has been speaking to the Western Mail . He told them that Mandelson might be going through a mid-life crisis.
His comment was prompted by Mandelson\'s claim that Kinnock and Lord Hattersely, Labour\'s former deputy leader and another Ed Miliband supporter, wanted to "hark back to a previous age". That was not true, Kinnock said.
OK, they were the glory days, we had great success. But they started 16 years ago [when Tony Blair was first elected Labour leader].I was a stripling of 52 then and am 68 now. Roy [Hattersley] is 10 years older than me, but he\'s a real spring chicken. What we have in common is that we have never, never lived in the past.
The duty of the Labour party is to focus on the present and provide relevant policies for the future. Maybe Peter is going through a midlife crisis.
10.29am: Downing Street has been in touch to say there won\'t be a lobby briefing this morning (see 8.47am). I called to ask about David Cameron. Apparently he\'s still in Cornwall on his paternity leave.
10.01am: Do you know what an "overhang" is? I\'m not really sure myself, but it\'s the word Ed Balls uses in an interview in the Financial Times (subscritpion) to describe his close relationship with Gordon Brown, and the damage that is doing him in the Labour leadership contest.
Here are some of the other comments that struck me in the interview.
• Balls criticised Ed Miliband for not introducing the living wage in his department when he was energy secretary . Balls said that he himself did introduce it at the department for children, implying that Miliband\'s support for the policy now is hypocritical. "I actually did it and when it came to the cruch in government [Ed] didn\'t, and that\'s a difference," Balls said.
• Balls said he only spoke to Gordon Brown once in August .
• Balls said he was "absolutely not a black arts politician" .
• Balls conceded he might not win . "I don\'t know if there will be enough time for me in this contest," he said. (Actually, that\'s not much of a concession. The polls suggest Balls is well behind the two Milibands.)
There\'s also a potentially important comment from the two authors of the piece, George Parker and Jim Pickard. They say David Miliband\'s supporters "say they cannot see Mr Balls being made shadow chancellor".
Balls is in many way the obvious candidate to become shadow chancellor if he does not win, but there are good reasons why he may not get the job, as my colleague Nicholas Watt explained at length in a blog yesterday .
9.33am: Here are some extracts from Kinnock\'s letter about Mandelson in the Times.
Peter Mandelson (Aug 30) is sadly out of date. If you shut the door on the New Labour, he says, you\'re effectively slamming the door in the faces of millions of voters who voted for our Party because we were New Labour.
But the indisputable fact is that, in 2005 and in May 2010, millions slammed the door on New Labour ...
Far from concentrating on the core vote rather than professional and affluent people, Ed Miliband strongly emphasises that Labour must reach out to the squeezed middle, a spectrum of voters that very definitely includes professional people and skilled workers, and he rightly says we should ban the phrase "core vote" — the core vote is a swing vote.
Such realism is compelling. It is earning increasing support from those who do not want to hark back to any previous age. Perhaps that is why atavists like Peter Mandelson are indulging in the sort of personalised factionalism that has inflicted such damage on our party in ancient and modern history. He should stop it now.
Kinnock\'s feelings about Mandelson may have been influenced by what the former business secretary had to say about his old Labour party boss in his autobiography. Not being a member of the Rothschild family, I didn\'t fancy taking Mandelson with me on holiday. But I did finish his book last week, and it contains extracts from some of the entries that Mandelson put in his diary when he was working for Labour in the 1980s. This is what he wrote about Kinnock in 1988.
The problem is that for all Neil\'s courage and strength of leadership, he is let down by his lack of self-confidence and his seeming lack of interest in the detail of policy. It shows not so much in what he says and does, but in what he fails to articulate and to achieve.
8.47am: Now, where were we? The last time I wrote a day-long politics live blog we were focusing on the Labour leadership contest and the coalition government\'s programme of cuts. Five weeks later, the holidays are over, MPs are preparing for the autumn conference season - and nothing much has changed.
Labour party members will be receiving their ballot papers for the leadership election this week and campaigning is at a peak. As my colleague Nicholas Watt reports in the Guardian today, David Miliband has responded to the threat of being portrayed as the heir to Tony Blair by delivering a rebuke to Lord Mandelson (who virtually endorsed Miliband in an interview in the Times on Saturday).
Overnight, there have been two new developments. Lord Kinnock has also responded to the Mandelson interview, using a letter to the Times (paywall) to criticise Mandelson for "indulging in the sort of personalised factionalism that has inflicted such damage on our party in ancient and modern history".
And Ed Balls has written an article for LabourList complaining about the way the leadership contest is being reported. "The now daily episodes of the Miliband soap opera suit those who want to keep this a two-horse race, but do not do justice to the issues at stake in this election," Balls writes.
And cuts stories are in the news too. The Financial Times says George Osborne wants to cut the number of staff at the Treasury by 25% (subscription), while the Times has got a story about Britain and France planning to share use of their aircraft carriers .
There\'s not a huge amount on the diary today. Andy Burnham is giving a speech on the NHS this morning, which my colleague Randeep Ramesh has already previewed in the Guardian .
And there will be a Downing Street lobby briefing at 11am, where we may learn more about David Cameron\'s paternity leave plans. I\'ll be covering all these, as well as looking at the papers in more detail, reporting any breaking news and bringing you all the best politics from the web.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/aug/31/politics-live-blog
