Tag Archives: Ed Miliband

Take, take, take, and a scant grasp of the facts – this week’s UK-EU hulabaloo

Anyone would think – from reading the stories today on The Guardian’s website – that the UK is shaping up for some major fight with the European Union over treaty reform prior to this week’s summit.

There are two problems with this.

First, the agreement might not be for treaty change at all at the summit this week, or at least not treaty change as the first priority. As the leaked Van Rompuy report (FT blog about it here, full document here) details, some of the measures for improved budgetary discipline could be pursued through an amendment of Protocol 12 of the Treaty, and this can be done by a decision of the European Council (after consulting the EP and the ECB), without needing national ratification. For the UK, this would require prior authorisation by an Act of Parliament, rather than ratification afterwards.

The second problem is the wider one, with the framing of this ‘repatriate or not / referendum or not’ debate. Where is any sense of European responsibility in this? If the Eurozone needs urgent changes, who is making the case in the UK that the UK will assist in this hour of need? Imagine Cameron were to succumb to backbench demands for repatriation and/or a referendum, and a referendum in the UK further messes up the Eurozone crisis… The whole debate in the UK is what the UK can take, take, take. How about what it can give too? Of course Labour could play that responsible role, but instead Ed Miliband chooses to poke the Prime Minister about repatriation at PMQs instead.

Email This Post Print This Post

Two speeches in Hyde Park – Brendan Barber vs. Ed Miliband

At the rally in Hyde Park yesterday after the March for the alternative, the first two speeches were given by Brendan Barber and Ed Miliband. I’ve used the text of the respective speeches (Barber’s here, Miliband’s here) to generate two Wordle clouds:

Barber
Barber - click to enlarge

Miliband
Miliband - click to enlarge

Quite an interesting contrast here, reflecting the nature of the two speeches…

While I’m on about the issue of these speeches, what the hell is the ‘mainstream majority’ that Miliband kept referring to? Surely any group that is a majority is – by definition – mainstream? I think he was trying to say that a majority of the population do not like the government’s cuts, but you could never imagine ‘mainstream majority’ escaping Barber’s lips.

Email This Post Print This Post

Cutting VAT on fuel – sending the wrong signals

Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are announcing some preliminary Labour economic policies today, and one of the headlines is a reduction in VAT on petrol, from 20% back to the 17.5% level it was set at prior to January this year. The main argument is that as petrol prices rise so this is hitting car drivers (read “middle England”).

It’s a short term solution, but I fear it will set a long term precedent – we should all be driving less, and be less dependent on oil, and a high fuel price is a crude way to achieve this, so today’s announcement is wrong. A fairer way to deal with this issue would be road pricing, but we know the mess Labour got into with that idea…

So what should Balls and Miliband say on fuel?

The solution is to set a flat rate tax on a litre of fuel, i.e. the same amount of cash goes to the exchequer, regardless of the price of oil. At the moment every litre of fuel is subject to the Hydrocarbon oil duty, currently £0.5895/litre, and VAT at 20%. This means that as the price of petrol goes up, so the amount of money the government makes from VAT on fuel also goes up, i.e. the motorist is hit twice. If price increases at the pump were only determined by rises in the price of crude it would be presentationally easier, not looking like the government is deliberately hitting the motorist, and also avoiding Labour advocating a VAT cut on fuel that symbolically looks anti-green.

Photo: tallkev “oldskool pump”
October 15, 2006 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution
Email This Post Print This Post

How a little Norwegian school results map could give Ed Miliband some ideas

The idea is simple, the map is stylish and easy to read, and the code is open source – welcome to skoleporten, the interactive map of Norwegian school results for junior schools (5th grade) and secondary schools (8th grade), produced by Evan Westvang, one of the programmers at Origo.no. More details on the Origo blog in Norwegian here. Sizes of squares represents size of schools, and colour represents how well they’re doing.

So what’s the significance of this for Ed Miliband and Labour (hence the title of the blog post)?

As government cuts start to bite Labour is going to be overloaded by stats – reductions in the number of police, inadequate numbers of teachers recruited etc. Some of these stats will be official numbers, others could be crowd-sourced impressions. Yet the danger is that Labour’s front bench team just spews out these numbers, into the never ending back and forth of the Westminster political game.


But how does it impact me as a citizen? My police station, the school down the road, the school across the borough that happens to be in a Tory controlled ward? For this Labour needs good and simple web tools – similar in style to skoleporten – to explain what’s happening, to make the reality of the cuts clear for everyone to understand. It’s not as if the data is not available – see the BBC’s school results search for example – but visualisation of the data is vital too.

Email This Post Print This Post

I, or Ed or David, in the Labour leadership election

No-one visiting a politician’s website realistically expects the site to be entirely written by the actual individual. But how should a site be written and designed on a candidate’s behalf? Importantly, what person should be used in the text?

Continue reading →

Email This Post Print This Post

Bleak political prospects in the UK – thoughts on Labour’s leadership

Ed & David Miliband - CC / Flickr

Ed & David Miliband - CC / Flickr

I met Dave Keating, author of the excellent Gulf Stream Blues blog, for a coffee yesterday and we started to chat about UK politics. What, he asked me, were my thoughts about Gordon Brown’s prospects? It seems that as the government’s opinion poll ratings have taken hit after hit so the stories have once again started to emerge about viable alternatives to Gordon Brown. Paul Linford and Mike Smithson are commenting on Alan Johnson, Mike also has thoughts about Ed Balls, while Sunny Hundal weighs in with the suggestion of Ed Miliband. The Gulf Stream seems to be blowing scant optimism from the Obama administration to UK shores.

Whenever my thoughts turn to Labour’s leadership enter my head I recall a frank conversation with Swedish Social Democrat MEP Åsa Westlund at the election party when Göran Persson had been kicked out of office in September 2006. Persson, a gruff bullying leader akin to Gordon Brown, had failed to renew his party while in power and Fredrik Reinfeldt came to power not because his börgerliga allians was especially good, but because he was not Persson. So, what should Labour in the UK learn I asked Åsa? “You need something new. Someone that is not so tied to the previous leadership,” was her reply.

I think she was right, and for that reason I would reject the prospects of Alan Johnson and Ed Balls from the off. Johnson has been a nondescript cabinet minister for years and years. OK, he was a postman so has a handy background for a Labour minister. But he completely incapable of inspiring people, and I’m not even sure if you would describe him as a leader. Balls has been Brown’s closest ally for years and lacks the personal and media skills to be effective. Same for anyone else who has been around since 1997; how can people with more than a decade of government behind them in any way come across as dynamic, daring or interesting? This is one of the essential points Jack Thurston makes regarding Labour and the internet – many of Labour’s top people have been around too long.

So where does that leave us? The only prospects as far as I am concerned are the Miliband brothers; Burnham and Purnell have not demonstrated any ability to communicate, nor leadership ability. Both Milibands are communicative, determined, reasonably interesting, and – above all – have a drive and degree of optimism that is plainly lacking from the other members of the Cabinet.

Which then leads on to David Cameron… Compare his front bench team to the line-up of Blair, Brown, Cook, Mandelson prior to the 1997 election and Cameron’s team looks really ropey in comparison. Labour is in danger of losing the next election if it does not get its own house in order; it for sure will not be due to good quality of the Conservative front bench.

Email This Post Print This Post