Results tagged “labour” from Birmingham Post - News Blog

Just what is David Miliband plotting? One story doing the rounds is that he is already drawing up plans for his first Cabinet - with former Health Secretary Alan Milburn as Chancellor.

But friends of the Foreign Secretary have denied this - apparently - and claimed it is a "smear" invented by Downing Street to make him look treacherous.

A third version of events has it that he is actually conspiring with Culture Secretary James Purnell and others to walk out of the Cabinet if a reshuffle takes place in September, potentially plunging the Government into meltdown.

Meanwhile, Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, has been taking up Pilates.The message? He's not going to retire on "health grounds".

This is politics as a game of Chinese whispers. As I said before, the longer this goes on, the more I find myself sympathising with the Prime Minister.

Ladywood MP Clare Short claims that David Miliband would be a lousy choice for Labour leader, partly because nobody has ever heard of him.

But nobody had heard of David Cameron before he stood for the Tory leadership. It was probably an advantage, as it helped him to present himself as someone who was changing his party.

If Labour does ditch Brown, or, indeed, if it keeps him but goes on to lose the next election, I think its best bet is also to go for a new face. Miliband's problem might actually be that he is too well known, and too associated with the current regime.

For example, there's Culture Secretary James Purnell, who I imagine can walk down the street more or less unrecognised.

Or how about a Minister who's not in the Cabinet? He won't thank me for this, but what about our very own Minister for the West Midlands, Liam Byrne (Hodge Hill)? Just throwing it out there . . .

Incidentally, although Clare Short has resigned the Labour whip and is not a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party, I think I'm right in saying that she is still a member of the Labour Party. If so, she'll get a vote in the leadership contest.

So Gordon Brown is to come to the West Midlands in a bid to prove he understands what ordinary people are going through. As well as a meeting of the Cabinet, there will be events where Ministers "listen and learn from the experiences of people in this country," to quote Downing Street.

I kind of wish him luck. Am I the only one who feels he doesn't deserve to be stabbed in the back by his colleagues? It's only 18 months ago that they were claiming he was the best thing since sliced bread.

But I'm not sure this listening and feel our pain business will be enough. What's been most surprising about the Brown premiership is the relative paucity of big ideas.

There have been some constitutional reforms, but mainly technical stuff which doesn't mean much to most people - downgrading the Royal Perogative (taking some power out of the hands of the Prime Minister and giving it to Parliament), abolishing regional assemblies and that sort of thing.

It's reported that some former Cabinet Ministers are planning to publish their own policy proposals, presumably in an effort to promote a more Blairite agenda. This will be seen as another effort to destabilise Mr Brown and perhaps it is, but I think the Prime Minister should consider saying thank you, and stealing their best ideas.

Latest gossip in Westminster is that the SNP is ahead in the Glasgow East by-election.

Of course, I have no idea if it will prove to be true when the result is announced about nine hours from now.

But it will be a disaster for Gordon Brown if his party has managed to lose a seat where it had a 13,500 majority - to the SNP, which is actually in power in the Scottish administration and shouldn't be receiving the type of boost opposition parties normally enjoy in by-elections.

Last night I predicted that Mr Brown would remain Labour leader until the next General Election no matter what.

My opposite number on the Liverpool Daily Post has a different view, and reckons Mr Brown will be out by the end of this year if he loses tonight.

School's out at Westminster, as Parliament has broken up for the summer break and won't be back until October.

This should make life easier for the press pack, who will have less to write about. In fact, it makes things harder, as you still need to come up with stories - there's just fewer of them around.

Hence, we have the silly season, which affects political journalism as much as any other field.

My guess is that we will see plenty of speculation about Mr Brown's future, whether he will face a leadership challenge etc. It's already begun, although it may take a while to get into top gear if Labour wins the Glasgow East by-election.

I'll stick my neck out and say talk of a leadership challenge is piffle. Brown won't go without putting up the mother of all fights; nobody wants to wield the knife, and whoever wins would probably be forced to call a General Election almost immediately.

Two members of the Government have suggested to me that Labour should not even put up a candidate in Haltemprice and Howden - and let David Davis fight it out with Miss Whiplash and the Monster Raving Loony Party.

The idea would be to portray the Shadow Home Secretary's decision to resign from the Commons as a stunt, which will force an expensive by-election which nobody wants.

It's certainly hard to see what a by-election will prove. If his seat was a Conservative/Labour marginal then, perhaps, a by-election resulting in a crushing Tory victory would prove that the public backs Mr Davis in his campaign to defend "fundamental British freedoms".

But it's actually a Tory-held seat where the Lib Dems are the challengers - and they're not even going to stand against him. Referring to Wednesday's vote on holding terror suspects for 42 days, Mr Davis said that if he is returned to Parliament it will be "with a single, simple message - that the monstrosity of a law that we passed yesterday will not stand." But the message, surely, will simply be that without a Lib Dem candidate, his is a safe Tory seat.

Yesterday the Daily Mail announced what they, no doubt regard a victory for their somewhat peculiar brand of 'common sense'. The paper proclaiming its vitriolic view that the result of continual pressure that they exerted on the issue 'Gordon Brown is to take personal responsibility for toughening the law on cannabis'. The same day, the PM appeared on GMTV and spoke on the evils of the weed, hinting as to his returning it to its former Class B status. For the Mail, long campaigners against re-classification to Class C status under Blair's regime some 4 years ago, 'The U-turn' could only be regarded 'a damning admission that Labour's soft policy of recent years was a mistake and will bring down the curtain on a disastrous experiment'.

For the rest of us, however, it might be time to ask whether Daily Mail journalists, and Gordon (the 'clunking fist') Brown for that matter, have been smoking something?

The Chancellor insisted today: "What I can't do is to rewrite the budget."

He sounded almost regretful. Hearing Alistair Darling speak, it didn't sound as if he believed the changes had been entirely for the best. The impression was strengthened when he pledged to "return" to the issue in future financial statements.

He was referring, of course, to the decision to scrap the starting 10p rate of income tax - so that people pay the higher, basic rate instead - to pay for a cut in the basic rate from 22p to 20p.

The effect is to increase taxes for people on lower salaries. The Chancellor and Gordon Brown, who announced the change back when he was Chancellor in 2007, would point out that most of those affected will enjoy the benefits of higher tax credits to make up for it. But an estimated five million are still worse off.

In fact, I wonder if the Government hasn't placed too much faith in this tax credit stuff. If you increase someone's taxes but make up for it in some other way, I suspect that what they remember is that you increased their taxes.

Will Charles Clarke challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership?

There's certainly a feeling among some Labour MPs that something has to change. The rebellion over the abolition of the 10p starting rate of income tax is driven partly by a fear among MPs in marginal seats that they are set to be kicked out of the Commons at the next election.

Hence, they are keen to distance themselves publicly from an unpopular and badly thought through policy, even if this causes difficulty for the Prime Minister.

But there's no sense that a leadership challenge is imminent or, for now at least, desirable. It's not as if Mr Brown is likely to go quietly before he has fought even one general election as Labour leader.

So it was odd that the Prime Minister chose to stoke the fires with his comments earlier this week, when he insisted: "I'm starting a job that I mean to continue."

This has been seen as his way of insisting that he won't be pushed out of office. A Prime Minister only says these things when he is in trouble, and the effect was to give talk of a leadership challenge more credibility than it currently deserves.

Digby Jones, now Lord Jones of Birmingham and a Trade Minister in Gordon Brown's Government, is reported to have told business leaders he will quit the Government before the next election - because he doesn't want to support the Prime Minister.

The generous view is that this is simply Lord Jones being consistent with what he has always said, that he's not in the Government to back Labour (or any other party), but simply to back British industry.

A less kind view is that this is yet another vote of no confidence in Mr Brown.

When is an election campaign not an election campaign?

The answer - when civil servants are called in to help.

The Prime Minister and Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, have been in Coventry this morning, launching Labour's local election campaign in the West Midlands.

They visit was organised by the Labour Party, and focused on plans to improve neighbourhood policing.

Meanwhile, Home Office Ministers have been out and about in a series of regional events.

Liam Byrne (Lab Hodge Hill) met police in Birmingham while Lord West was in Cambridge, Tony McNulty was in Watford, Meg Hillier was in Merseyside and Vernon Coaker was in Nottingham.

Once again, the visits were promoting plans to improve regional policing.

But instead of Labour Party officials doing the organising, these visits were arranged by civil servants.

The difference was that they were billed as Home Office events, and nothing to do with the election launch at all. Just a coincidence, presumably.

It's clear that elections are looming, as the parties are pulling out the stops to get their messages across.

Labour are distributing a press statement boasting about councils imposing the lowest council tax increases for 14 years, complete with figures which apparently show Labour councils charge less tax.

Their press release even claims that half of all councils have introduced council tax increases below the retail price index - which is running at 4.1 per cent.

This is unusual, because the Government usually prefers to focus on a different measure of inflation, the consumer price index, which is much lower at just 2.5 per cent.

However, Labour concede that 85 per cent of authorities are imposing above-inflation tax hikes if this measure of inflation is used.