Congratulations Ed Miliband

I can't tell you how relieved I am that Ed Miliband defeated David Miliband for the Labour leadership. I'm sorry for David M and all, but he would have been wrong for the leadership. And my fave Ed Balls came a respectable third.

I think Labour people will be pretty happy with this result. The press of course are spitting feathers as their pick didn't get the job.

One meme going around is that he wasn't the first pick of the MPs part of the electoral college. But the MPs don't exactly have a brilliant record for picking winners do they? In the last 30 years, the only two leaders of Labour who were chosen solely by the MPs were Michael Foot and our poor grumpy Gord. Good men to be sure, but they didn't win elections.

The full electoral college has a better record. When they chose Kinnock over Hattersley, there were similar cries about how Labour had "lurched left", but actually it was a sign Labour was marching to the centre. It was Kinnock after all who chased Militant out of Labour and began the rebranding of the party that was to lead to victory in 1997. The full electoral college also chose John Smith and Tony Blair, and in 2007 chose Harriet Harman as Deputy Leader.

When Harman won, again we saw the press cry "left wing" (and the MPs went for Alan Johnson, the man who was silly enough to urge people to vote tactically for the LibDems in the lead up to the 2010 election). Harman proved to be the right choice - under her temporary leadership, Labour recovered incredibly fast after the election. The Tories took 10 years and four leaders to at last recover in the polls in 2007 after their 1997 defeat. It took Harriet two months.

Why does the full electoral college make sounder decisions than the MPs? Mainly because they live in real Britain, rather than in the Westminster bubble, talking to a narrow press that seeks to influence them.

As for the meme that the EdM is a "union" man, the affiliates weren't exactly uniform in the way they voted. USDAW plumped very heavily for David Miliband, CWU went heavily for Ed Balls, and Aslef and the Musicians Union went for Diane. As for the non-union affiliates, the Fabians went narrowly for David Miliband, as did Black Asian Minority Ethnic Labour, Labour Students and the Society of Labour Lawyers. Labour is quite a complex movement and not easy to stereotype - though I've no doubt our enemies will have a go.

The Labour Leadership Election

I've been way too busy to post, and to be truthful haven't had the time to follow the leadership contest closely either - but I'm not sure that's entirely a bad thing. This is how most voters absorb their politics, on the periphery of their lives, in snippets. Tiny things seep through, lots of things that the chatterati think are important don't, and a conclusion is formed.

So here's who I'm voting for (and the list is in a different order than it was when the contest first started, so the long contest has changed my mind).

1. Ed Balls. He gets my first preference. I think he's the brightest of all the contestants, and the only "Essex bloke" type in this contest, and why shouldn't Essex bloke have a go at leading a major political party? Polls are showing that on education the coalition has a negative rating, which is entirely down to how well Balls has communicated his position to voters. He probably won't win due to his closeness to Brown, but I'm giving him first preference so that he has a base to play a major part in the fight to regain power.

2. Andy Burnham. He wasn't even on my radar when this contest started. I'm giving him second preference (and hope he wins) mainly because I like him. It's not just me -everyone seems to like him, whether they are political or non political. This is a huge deal for a politician, it's like the holy grail. I also like his opposition towards electoral reform, and his willingness to think outside the box. He is not associated at all with the previous Labour administration, despite having served in it, and I think a Burnham led Labour party would mark a fresh start. I also think there's some underlying grit in him in the way he has kept at it, refusing to concede that it's just a Miliband v Miliband affair, and continuing to come up with initiatives.

3. Ed Miliband. Originally he was my favourite, but has fallen back. It boils down to this - I don't think he's tough enough for the job of leader.

4. David Miliband. I tried to give him a fair hearing, but every time he opens his mouth he puts me off. He just talks jargon, and sometimes I'm not even certain he knows what he means. The only time I got a glimmer of the real David underneath the geek-speak was when he did a live web interview on the Guardian's CiF - but unfortunately he cut it short because he apparently had somewhere more important to be, and for me that summed up his problem: he doesn't realise he has a communication problem and that engaging with voters and critics is important. The MPs will probably vote for him overwhelmingly, but we must hope that members and affiliates don't.

5. Diane Abbott. What can I say? She's intelligent, not as left wing as she pretends, but ruins it all by being too grand to engage. Still she did inject a little flurry of excitement at the start of the contest.

So there you go. I'm crossing my fingers that Andy Burnham is the dark horse who will come through the middle. I wish I had been able to campaign for his candidacy earlier but life and business got in the way.

Labour edges up in the polls

In the opinion polls since the general election, Labour has slowly been edging up. We were about 32% in mid June, and that went up to about 35% in early July. And then we appeared to be stuck.

But the latest poll from YouGov (fieldwork 15th - 16th July) shows us on the move again. Here's the figures:

Con 40%
Lab 37%
LD 15%

So we are within 3% of the Tories.

And the cause of this sudden shift? In my opinion it's down to all the stuff in the news about the NHS. Cameron made a big song and dance during the election campaign about not touching the NHS, and here he is looking to break it up by re-organisation.

The Con-Dems seem to have decided that manifesto pledges and promises don't matter, and every day they get more cavalier about breaking them, reasoning that there wasn't that much of an outcry about the last pledge they broke, so why not break some more? It actually does matter, and the effect is cumulative. The more pledges you break the more distrustful the population gets, and then comes the tipping point.

The NHS is also the third rail of British politics. Touch it and you die. If there is any fall-out in patient care as a result of this, the Con-Dems will pay a penalty.

The other interesting thing about the YouGov poll was the response to the question "Do you think this coalition government will be good or bad for people like you?"

Total good 36%
Total bad 39%
No difference 15%
Don't know 9%

That's a change round from the YouGov poll done at the start of July (fieldwork 1st-2nd July). Then it was

Total good 41%
Total Bad 36%
No difference 15%
Don't know 8%

The constant pessimism dripping out of the government combined with such events as the chair of the new OBR resigning, have dented confidence.

Congratulations Spain

... and now is the cue for Zapatero to announce that Spain only wins the World Cup, European Championships, the Paris Open and Wimbledon Championships when a socialist government is in power!

Meanwhile, in Britain everything has turned to ashes since the ConDems took power - we were bottom in the Eurovision, out in the second round in the World Cup (after coming second to the USA in the first round for heavens sakes!) Business confidence has turned down, the IMF has downgraded our growth forecast directly as a result of the draconian action of the ConDems to take vengeance against the public sector, (the coalition dimwits believe the public sector caused the credit crunch).

Plus all sorts of lunatics are going on gun rampages - first Derrick Bird, now Raoul Moat. You have to go back to John Major's government and Dunblane (and Huntingdon under Thatcher) for the last episodes. And it's only been just over two months since they were in power.

Crime always rises under Tory governments, it rose steadily from 1979 to 1997, and looks like rising again. It's a combination of Tories cutting back on the police while at the same time causing stress in the population at large, which always tips those at the edge into violence.

Minutes from BoE Monetary Policy Committee

The minutes have been published of the BoE's Monetary Policy Committee for their meeting in the first week in June - and the shock is that for the first time in two years, one member, Andrew Sentence, has voted to raise interest rates.

He was worried about inflation, and the minutes show that other members agreed with him in discussion (though they didn't vote for a rise in interest rates). And remember this was before they BoE members knew what was in the budget.

The budget will have made him even more hawkish - as I said in my previous post on VAT, it will add to inflationary pressures that are building due to the falling pound (and sterling as been falling since the election because the markets believe that the Coalition is going to tip us back into recession).


I have some sympathy with the need to normalise interest rates. If you look at the graph left, during the global recession of 2001-3, the UK dealt with the crisis by loosening fiscal policy, and while interest rates were cut, they didn't fall too low, and the monetary stimulus was removed pretty promptly. The USA though not only loosened fiscal policy, but turned on the monetary taps too wide, causing the massive commodity speculation that did so much to hurt the world economy, plus of course a housing bubble, which led to the credit crunch.

It might be smarter for all economies to have higher interest rates and a looser fiscal policy rather than the situation we have now, where everyone in Europe is tightening fiscal policy, but money is still extremely cheap, which means we have all manner of speculation going on, from attacks on sovereign countries to an oil price that is artificially high given global economic conditions.

The nightmare scenario is if uber-loose money causes inflation, and you end up with a toxic situation of tightening monetary policy at the same time as tightening fiscal policy. The Coalition are expecting the BoE to keep monetary policy loose in response to their fiscal tightening (see the comments from the OBR), but the BoE might not be able to deliver, especially when the government recklessly puts up VAT. You'd think they would have learnt from Thatcher's experience of jacking up VAT from 8.5% to 15% in the early 80's, but no!

Like most Labour people, I hate VAT with a purple passion; it slows consumption, it's regressive, it contributes to price inflation, and worst of all, once you put it up you can't cut it without the agreement of all 27 members of the EU (and that's unlikely to happen when many EU countries have higher VAT than us).

I've no idea why Tories are so enamoured of it. I think they believe that it's a stealth tax that no one notices - but it actually causes a lot of damage to the economy, (a lot of the ills of the previous Tory govt can be laid at the door of their VAT policy). I guess we are heading back to an era of low growth under Conservatives

Tory VAT Rise was being planned as long ago as August 2009

Lots of Coalition supporters are trying to claim that this VAT rise was unplanned and merely a consequence of coalition negotiations. But actually it was planned as long ago as August 2009.

The Sunday Telegraph, which always has good contacts within the Tory party, reported on 8th August 2009 in an article titled Tories study plans for 20pc VAT that

"The proposal [to raise VAT to 20%] is being “very actively considered” at the highest level, according to senior shadow ministerial sources.
It could be introduced within weeks of a Tory victory at the next election, which must be held by June, in a package that is also likely to include severe cuts to public spending.

...A shadow ministerial source said: “Tax rises will have to be part of the equation. It will be time for some strong medicine.”
By moving quickly to increase VAT after the election, senior Conservatives believe they will be able to pin the blame for the state of the public finances on Gordon Brown and his outgoing Labour government.
They would be following in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher, who increased VAT to 15 per cent in the 1981 Budget, also at a time when Britain was struggling to emerge from a recession.

...It would hit charities and businesses which do not levy VAT – because they would have to pay the tax on items they bought but would not be able to recoup the cost from customers."

After the Sunday Telegraph scoop, Tories took to the airwaves to deny they were raising VAT, but of course they were lying. The lies were continued by Cameron into the election debates.

My assessment of this budget is that it's pretty much exactly what the Tories were intending to do if they had got a majority of their own. There appears barely any LibDem input - in other words this is a budget that the country refused to endorse by refusing to give the Tories a majority - yet we've got it just the same.

The LibDems need to start asking questions about just what they are getting out of this - If they are rubber-stamping this just for electoral reform in return, they will find they've been had, as I am pretty sure no electoral reform will be forthcoming. It's actually quite stunning that they've allowed themselves to be made responsible for a far-right budget and without protest.

One more thing - the VAT rise will bump up inflation, which means that the BoE will have to respond with rising interest rates, especially as the falling pound (which has been dropping like a stone against the dollar every since the Coalition took office) continues to stoke inflation in oil and food. So we will have a tightening fiscal policy at the same time as a tightening monetary policy, and at the same time as our main trading partners in Europe contract demand. Watch not only for a double dip recession, but for the budget deficit to increase as a result of these hair-brained Tory policies hitting growth.

Duplicitous Dems: Nick Clegg on Expenses in the Debates

Found this classic of Nick Clegg on expenses, where he condemns CGT avoidance, and expense abuse, and then says "I have to stress that not a single LibDem MP has done any of these things".

Re-emergence of expenses scandal puts Ed Miliband in pole position for Labour leadership

Today we have the Telegraph going for Danny Alexander - it's clear that they will continue to use their treasure-trove of unredacted expense accounts to attack anyone who was in the last parliament.

IMO, this puts Ed Miliband in pole position for Labour leadership because his expenses are so low.

Here's what they were in the last parliament:

2008/9 £7,783
2007/8 £7,670
2006/7 £7,795
2005/6 £7,246

The low claims are due to the fact that his second home is a tiny two-up two-down terrace in his constituency that he rents. He's one of the few MPs who lives in similar surroundings to his constituents. According to the Telegraph the rest of his expenses consisted of utility bills on his second home, a TV licence, council tax and telephone bills. That was it. No cake-tins, no claims for wisteria-trimming, no food, no telly, no furniture, no gardening, no mortgage interest.

He clearly regarded the expenses in the spirit they were intended - as simply a way to enable him to crash in his constituency at the weekends while he did his surgery work. It never seems to have crossed his mind that he could profit from them.

If he's elected leader of the Labour party, he will make a sharp contrast to the two posh boys at No 10. Here's their expenses bills for those who missed them, and note how both Cameron and Clegg claimed close to the maximum they could despite being millionaires.

David Cameron

2008/9 £20,240
2007/8 £19,626
2006/7 £20,563
2005/6 £21,359

Nick Clegg

2008/9 £17,081
2007/8 £23,083
2006/7 £22,050
2005/6 £21,610

Ed Miliband also checks some other boxes: he was educated at a comprehensive school; he was not in parliament at all during Iraq either as an MP or as an advisor (he was lecturing at an American university at the time). He is a warm personality who can communicate. His family set-up also resembles modern Britain more than that of the leaders of the other parties: he lives with his girlfriend and the couple have one child and are expecting another in November.

For me, the only doubt is whether he can be assertive. But then again, he can always leave the bad-cop stuff to a member of his cabinet. Politics (especially in Labour) is a team sport.

Press gets a govt scalp just three weeks into new parliament

Further to my previous post on David Laws and expenses, David Laws has resigned. Honeymoon over for the new ConDem Coalition, just three weeks into their government.

There appears to be a lot of gnashing of teeth from both the Tory and LibDem camps, indeed some on Conservative Home are talking about boycotting the Telegraph, which is childish in the extreme!

I suppose none of them were really prepared for the ferocious bearpit that governing Britain in the 21st century has become. Pre 1997 there was no BBC news 24 or other UK 24-hour channels, there was no blogosphere, newspapers had barely gone online let alone got into the habit of updating their sites all hours of the day at the first hint of news. If Tories are struggling with the new world, it's even harder for the LibDems, as they were generally ignored, which meant they went under the radar most of the time.

Both Tories and LibDems have got used to carping from the sidelines, and suddenly they are in the hot-seat. Laughably, some were arguing today that Laws should be left alone, "because he's in government and has a job to do". Well being in government means having to do your work while being battered 24/7 by the press, and you fit in eating, sleeping, cuddles with your spouse and reading stories to your kids, as and when. Anyone in doubt should read Alastair Campbell's account of the Blair Years.

There seems to be some pique amongst the Coalition that Tory papers such as the Telegraph are having a go. What they need to understand is that while the Tory press will be supportive of a Tory govt when they can, they are essentially businesses in an era where they are all making losses, bar the Daily Mail. The need to hold onto readers and therefore advertisers is paramount, and trumps any loyalty they may have to Cameron and co. That's business for you.

The Telegraph has decided that their USP is breaking important stories. The more they can do this, the more likely they will become the go-to place for all news, and gain an edge over their competitors. Yes, they will lose a few hundred activists from Conservative Home, but may gain a several thousand readers from middle Britain. For them, it's a dog-eat-dog world and yes, they will happily eat Tories for breakfast too if it earns them a crust.

Tories and LibDems should get used to it - it could be much worse. Labour not only had to face hungry-animal press, but wall-to-wall hostile Tory press, even when they'd been fed. Despite this, Labour still lasted 13 years and managed to deny the Tories a majority in 2010.

If the poor precious ConDems can't cope, there is always the option of throwing in the towel and letting the battle-hardened Labour machine take over the hard business of government.

David Laws and Expenses

After all the showy grandstanding done by David Laws on how he wanted to save government money (even insisting that ministers walk to meetings instead of using cars), it turns out that he himself was claiming about £40,000 to subsidize his lover by saying he was renting rooms in his house.

Now that expenses has reared it's ugly head again, I thought it would be a good time to look at the expenses of the candidates for the Labour leadership. We need them to be scrupulously clean as well as capable of being Prime Minister. So here's what was claimed in the last parliament (figures are only available up to 2008/9).

Ed Miliband

2008/9 £7,783
2007/8 £7,670
2006/7 £7,795
2005/6 £7,246

Ed Balls

2008/9 £11,840
2007/8 £12,219
2006/7 £15,979
2005/6 £13.618

David Miliband

2008/9 £ 9,083
2007/8 £17,387
2006/7 £16,728
2005/6 £21,611

Andy Burnham

2008/9 £12,301
2007/8 £10,504
2006/7 £13,461
2005/6 £16,147

John McDonnell

2008/9 £0
2007/8 £0
2006/7 £0
2005/6 £0

Dianne Abbott

2008/9 £0
2007/8 £0
2006/7 £0
2005/6 £0

For contrast, here's the expenses of the leader of the Tories and the leader of the LibDems:

David Cameron

2008/9 £20,240
2007/8 £19,626
2006/7 £20,563
2005/6 £21,359

Nick Clegg

2008/9 £17,081
2007/8 £23,083
2006/7 £22,050
2005/6 £21,610


John McDonnell and Dianne Abbott are both London MPs (represending Hayes and Harlington, and Hackney North and Stoke Newington respectively), so they didn't need to claim anything compared the to MPs representing Northern seats, such as Doncaster (Ed Miliband), Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), South Shields (David Miliband) and Leigh (Andy Burnham). It's worth noting however that Jon Cruddas, a London MP, somehow did manage to claim the full allowance (another reason it's a good thing that Cruddas isn't running), so good on Dianne Abbott and John McDonnell for being so honest

Ed Balls did move his primary residence from London to Castleford in 2007, but insisted on paying the full CGT at the time, despite being told he didn't need to by the expenses office. He was also part of the minority in the House of Commons who voted to reform the expenses system in 2008, indicating a certain political prescience (if that vote had been won, a lot of grief would have been avoided).

Cameron and Clegg claim rather a lot considering they are both millionaires. Cameron for instance was claiming nearly three times what Ed Miliband claimed, and his constituency is considerably closer to London than Ed's. All our candidates look good compared to them.

George Osborne's Spending Cuts

Osborne unveiled his spending cuts by claiming that unless he cut, debt repayments would "spiral out of control".

As it happens, the deficit is falling. Contrary to the claims made by Osborne and Laws that the Labour government's projections were too optimistic, it turns out that Darling was being too pessimistic: last year's deficit turned out to be £156 bn undershooting Darling's projection of £170bn. (Laws owes Darling a public apology). Given that many Tory forecasters were claiming that the deficit last year would hit £200bn, they must be scratching their heads wondering how Darling managed to "cut" the deficit so sharply without actually cutting.

Simples. You just hold steady, reassure consumers, and economic activity lifts, raising tax receipts sharply and cutting support you need to give those unemployed.

Labour's argument was always that you should only cut govt spending when the private sector is going full-pelt (which is what Gord did in the six years to 2002 and the dot.com recession). That way, not only does the economy not feel the cuts, the cuts dampen the chances of runaway inflation.

But for ideological reasons, the Tories seem to be chomping at the bit to make cuts right now, regardless of the state of the economy.

From what has been announced, two sectors will be really hit - local government will expecience a 7.4% cut in grants, which they will need to make up either by council tax rises or cuts.

The other sector to be hit is the private sector, as Stephanie Flanders points out in her blog. They will be bearing 27% of all the cuts announced today by Laws and Osborne. They are getting screwed in multiple ways, from having contracts cancelled to taxi drivers losing business. All of this will impact those sectors' revenue, profits and the tax receipts the govt gets from them.

A lot of ideological anti-state people simply don't realise how intertwined the private sector is with the state. This is not 1979 when the state directly employed everyone who did anything with public money. The Labour government tended to hire private contractors whenever they needed stuff done.

Therefore it shouldn't surprise that any public spending cuts will hurt the private sector most. And this is just the first round.

If the Osborne-Laws cuts damage the private sector badly, watch for tax receipts to nose-dive and the deficit to get bigger as a result of these cuts.

How worried are the Tories about the Daily Mail?

Ever since the ConDem Coalition was formed, the Daily Mail has been attacking, with a negative story pretty much every day. Their narrative is that the Coalition is attacking Middle Britain, and that Cameron is a desperately weak man who is being walked all over by Clegg, who is really running the country.

This is clearly bothering Cameron, who penned an article in the Mail today with the title Yes, we've ditched some policies but I'm still a Tory PM

The bit that leapt out at me was that he felt it necessary to say that he was "still a Tory" - and predictably, most of the comments responded "no you're not", and talked bitterly about manifesto pledges dropped.

How dangerous is all this for Cameron?

The Daily Mail used to attack Tony Blair relentlessly too, but Blair had the advantage that Labour voters did not read the paper (the "Tony's Tories" who had switched to Labour in '97 read the Times, which remained firmly supportive during Blair's period in office). The Mail had to wait till 2001 to get a scalp with the Cheriegate affair, and then only because the story was taken up by the broadcasters and other news outlets. Blair also had the benefit of vast majorities, which meant that if he lost two or three million voters here or there, it barely dented him in the first ten years.

Cameron does not have a majority in his own right, and can't afford to lose any Tory voters at all. Worse, his voters actually read the Mail and are affected by that paper's narrative.

I'm also struck by how people are mentioning manifestos more and more. Voters don't like being told one thing during a campaign and getting another after the election. Labour was very careful in it's 13 years to honour it's manifestos, even delaying tuition fees so that it could go into the 2001 manifesto so that those who hated it had the chance to vote against. You can count on one hand the manifesto pledges dropped in the last 13 years.

By contrast Cameron has dumped a shedload of pledges in just two weeks, and coupled with his dropping of his "cast iron guarantee" before the election, gives him the aura of a man with no honour. Add to this the accusation that he was "weak" during the negotiations and you get a toxic cocktail.

My assessment of the coalition so far is that the LibDems are having a better press about it. They are on TV all the time, and they seem to have the upper hand. Clegg is handsome, articulate and also seems to be leading his parliamentary party better than Cameron, prompting jealousy amongst Tory MPs. The rivalry between the two groups can only grow.

Ed Balls brings a touch of Essex Man to the Labour Leadership Contest

In the Newsnight focus group on the Labour leadership contest a few nights ago, one member of the group said that Ed Balls looked like the type of bloke who could be found behind a kebab counter. Which made everyone laugh because there is a touch of Essex man about him (he actually comes from Norfolk, but for our purposes lets use "Essex" as a shorthand for the culture of those regions east of London).

We've never had Essex bloke contest the Labour leadership before. Blair was smooth barrister man, Prescott was northern working class man. Brown was grumpy dour Scotsman while John Smith was bank-manager Scotsman. Kinnock was a Welshman and Michael Foot was other-worldly academic man. David Miliband is geeky wonkman. The brash hustler that is Essex man has never had a look in - till now.

It was Essex man of course who put Thatcher into Downing Street, Labour has never really had deep roots in the Eastern region. In the 2010 election, the only seats in the east we won were the two in Luton. But we need to regain seats there if we are to win the next general election.

So I'm glad Ed Balls is standing, he brings something of the culture of eastern England into the contest (though ideally I would have preferred his wife as a candidate).

One of the benefits of the long leadership contest is that the public will get to really know these candidates - at present, they are only really well known by activists and politicos. We know how they play in the blogosphere, but not really how they play in Middle Britain. Lets hope something happens to make one of them resonate with the voters. Will they want to sip wine with a Miliband over erudite conversation or watch the World Cup over a few beers and a kebab with the Essex bloke? It will be fascinating to find out!

The Post Election Polls

We have two polls, signalling a sharp increase in the Labour share of the vote since the general election and the formation of the ConDem coalition:

ComRes: 38%, Lab, 34%, LD 21%
ICM: Con 38%, Lab 33%, LD 21%

Note that both these pollsters have a habit of overstating the LibDems and understating Labour. Here's how their pre-election polls compared with the actual General Election result:

Election result 6th May: Con 36.1%, Lab 29%, LD 23%, others 11.9%
Com Res 5th May: Con 37%, Lab 28%, LD 28%
ICM 5th May: Con 36%, Lab 28%, LD 26%

So Labour has much to work with. Apart from electing a new leader, we need to defeat the attempt by the ConDems to fix parliament terms for five years with a 55% requirement for disolution. I understand that they are justifying these constitutional changes with "stability", in much the same way the Chinese government cites "stability" as the reason not to hold elections at all. We also need to hammer away at the weak points of the coalition (after all, the duty of the opposition is to oppose!)

Finally, we need to think about reclaiming the LibDem areas, where we traditionally don't bother to canvass overmuch, leaving our Labour supporters to "vote LibDem to keep the Tories out". Obviously that won't work anymore, and Labour needs to step into the vacuum in various parts of the country, and the sooner this work gets under way the better - after all, given the history of coalitions, there may be another general election next year.

Update: Check out this post by Tom Harris MP, where he quotes Nick Clegg in 2008: "Will I ever join with the conservative party? No, I refuse to be merely an annex of another government." He was just saying one thing to Labour voters, while no doubt saying something else to Conservatives to trick people into voting for him.

Update2: Very interesting to compare the current situation to the post-election ICM polls of 1992 and 1997. ICM came closest in predicting both those election results and here's what their post election polls looked like:

1997: Lab 61%, Con 23%, Lib 12%, Others 4%
1992: Lab 34%, Con 45%, Lib 17%, Others 4%

Part of the reason Labour got such a bounce in the post-1997 poll was because Brown made the BoE independent the day after the election, delighting the whole country, including Conservative voters, and restoring confidence to the property market. However, it's interesting to note that John Major got a bounce in the post 1992 poll too, fitting in with the pattern that most govts get a good-will post-election bounce.

Now we have a 1% bounce for the Tories, a 3% drop for the Libs, and Labour after being in govt for 13 years in govt, and losing an election, bouncing up 3% within a week. What is going on?

I think the country is in an uncertain mood - I'm not at all sure they liked all the horse-trading and negotiating. With normal election results, you pick a manifesto, those who voted for the winning party got the manifesto they wanted. With this horse-trading, almost no-one amongst the voters get the package they wanted, but the politicians got jobs they weren't expecting (e.g. Cameron fully expected to be turfed out by his party for not winning, and Clegg probably expected the same after winning fewer seats than Charlie Kennedy). Would not be at all surprised if the referendum on AV delivered a No.

Can we persuade Yvette Cooper to run?

Someone who commented on my previous post noted how narrow Ed Ball's majority was in the recent general election - it's a major handicap to him becoming Labour leader. So I guess that's him crossed off the list. What about Yvette Cooper instead? She's ruled herself out, but can the Labour movement persuade her to change her mind?

She would make a decent contrast to the bland Miliband brothers, and an even better contrast to the two posh boys in Number 10.

Here's the bones of her C.V.:

She was born in March 1969, the daughter of Tony Cooper, a Nuclear Industry specialist who was appointed by the last Conservative government to their Energy Advisory Panel, and the grand-daughter of a miner.

She was educated in a comprehensive school in North Hampshire, and then went to Balliol College, Oxford to read PPE. She then won a Kennedy Scolarship to Harvard University in 1991, and when she finished that, got a Masters in Economics from the London School of Economics.

She then worked in Arkansas as domestic policy specialist for Bill Clinton in the lead-up to his successful bid for the US Presidency in 1992.

She's been the MP for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford since 1997, winning large majorities in what is a very safe seat. She married Ed Balls in 1998, and the couple have three children.

The main barrier to her seeking the Labour leadership appears to be the ambitions of her husband. But instead of her doing the traditional thing and stepping aside for her husband, wouldn't it be nice if he stepped aside for her? It would make a telling contrast to the posh boys at No 10 and their Stepford wives.