Brown and I agree on something

That David Milliband's missive in yesterday's Guardian was a job application. The reaction is furious, and ill-judged, with anonymous briefings and two backbench MPs calling for Milliband to be sacked. Think on it, this is the Prime Minister laying into his own Foreign Secretary, careless of the damage such behaviour must do to his government. Where Blair would have taken it on the chin, at least in public, because he knew over-reaction would only given the story legs and credibility, Brown unleashes the great clunking fist and thereby puts 'Labour splits' onto front pages and news bulletins. Does he really think that he can keep the cabinet in line through fear? If that is true then the Labour frontbench are worms, but I don't believe that. These aren't Wehrmacht generals bound by some blood oath into ignoring the historical interests of their own people for the ravings of a madman, rather these are decent men and women with a commitment to public service, and, frankly, they won't be impressed. So, Milliband goes onto the radio today as if nothing had happened, and he still doesn't speak up for his boss. What will Gordon do next? Sack him?

Politics 101: keep people inside the tent, or you might become unexpectedly wet.

Brown's challenger breaks cover

David Milliband broke cover today with an article in the Guardian talking about Labour renewal. For those not skilled in the art of political doubletalk what it really says is ‘I am a candidate for the forthcoming leadership election’. What it means is that Milliband has broken with the ‘caretaker leader from an older generation leading Labour to a not too catastrophic defeat at the next election then resigning in favour of a young Turk’ scenario. This would have seen our man placed to move smoothly in to pick up the pieces in opposition. Instead, he is going for the leadership of the party now, calculating that he could hang on to it even in defeat by blaming Brown for the mess. This is serious stuff; because now a credible challenger has emerged Brown will be faced by much the same dilemma that Blair faced with him. Is Milliband more dangerous to Brown in the Foreign Office or on the back benches? There are rumours of a reshuffle after all.

One thing is certain, Milliband is more dangerous to the Conservative Party than Brown ever could be.

Rubbish in Pitsea

So, they passed it. We are going to have a refuse treatment plant at Courtauld Road in Pitsea that will treat the rubbish of the whole of the South of the county, thanks to Essex County Council passing the planning application. This was opposed by Basildon District Council, all parties in a rare moment of unanimity, local pressure groups and the local population. In fact, I never met a single person in favour of the scheme who lived anywhere near the site. The real problem with one rubbish disposal site for such a huge area is getting the rubbish to the site in the first place. You have to remember that this development has been so long in gestation that the world has changed radically since it was devised. Today, the idea of 400 vehicle movements per day in order to ship rubbish to Basildon from as far away as Epping Forest seems absurdly unsustainable. Not that stopped Essex County Council’s planning committee.

Still, there is one ray of hope. The scheme depends on government funding in the tens of millions or else it goes nowhere. Right now the government hasn’t got a bean, and anyway they may not be the government for very much longer. There may be a few icebergs before a Titanic of rubbish sails into Pitsea.

Electoral Calculus says Labour doing better

From the Electoral Calculus website:

Recent polls still show a very strong Conservative lead over Labour, but one which
is slightly reduced from last month. Populus (Times) has 13% (down from 20%),
YouGov (Sunday Times) has 22% (up from 18%), ComRes (Independent on Sunday) has 21% (unchanged), ICM (Guardian) sees 15% (down from 20%), and Ipsos-MORI has 20% (up from 17%).

Overall the Conservative lead is 18% which is 1% lower than June. The prediction also includes the results of the recent YouGov poll in Scotland showing the SNP 4% ahead of Labour. As is our standard practice, we do not include the results of by-elections in the prediction because they are not a good predictor of subsequent general elections.

The current prediction is that the Conservatives will have a majority of 160 seats,
winning 405 seats (-1 seat since 28 Jun 2008).

Not really going to send Gordon on holiday with a spring to his step.

The other election on Thursday

This was a Council election in Westminster:



The Labour candidate was Dave Rowntree, whose previous claim to fame was as the drummer in Blur. He lost pretty spectacularly in a 14.1% swing to the Conservatives. What is significant is that this particular seat has never had anything other than a Labour Councillor from its inception. Gordon Brown's Labour continues to set records.

Labour grassroots react to Glasgow East

Catastrophe in Glasgow East, and it finally seems to be dawning on the people's party what everyone else figured out some time ago: Gordon Brown is electoral poison. So, the chaps at Labourhome are in open revolt, with an astonishingly candid debate on whether to ditch their leader.

The by-election result was awful for Labour, but hey, by-elections are not always a good guide to a subsequent general election. In this case, however, there is an interesting detail: turnout was high, only a little behind that in that last general election. This means Labour voters were not staying at home, they were coming out and voting for someone else. So, will someone tell me who exactly is today's Labour is meant to appeal to? They came fifth in Henley, so it's not the affluent. They lost in Crewe and Nantwich, so it's not the aspirational. They lost in Glasgow East, so it's not the struggling. Rejection right across the demographic spectrum is difficult to achieve, but Gordon Brown has managed it.

If they had the brains that God gave a weasel then Labour would ditch Brown. Let's hope they don't eh?

Glasgow East votes today

The punditry has more or less decided that Labour is going to squeak home in Glasgow East tonight. That the result is even a matter for debate is a commentary on where Labour is under Gordon Brown's leadership, though perhaps 'leadership' is too strong a word. The result is everything. If Labour's majority is slashed then everything depends on how much by. A very close result will put the fear of God into Labour MPs much farther afield than Scotland. If Labour lose then Brown is, as a parliamentary friend of mine put it, toast.

Simon Heffer does OK

I have been quite critical about Simon Heffer in the past, but one must be fair. His last column actually wasn't too bad.

Basildon to keep emptying the bins

Public health has improved enormously since the days of the Victorians, and that improvement is largely down to the Victorians. However, it isn’t advances in medicine, even widespread immunisation, which has increased life expectancy since the days that we sent children up chimneys. That has largely come from seemingly simple measures such as clean water, sewerage and the efficient collection of waste. So, Local Authorities have a duty to collect the rubbish that is a legacy of Victorian times. Now, incredibly, this government wants to do away with that responsibility, seemingly as part of its push to give Councils’ any excuse not to pick up people’s bins.

Basildon Council has the same pressures as everyone else: legislative incentives to recycle that mean considerable investment, and so there has been the temptation to play fast and loose with our rubbish collection responsibilities. Well, we haven’t, because we think that this basic service is so essential that even tentative suggestions to even think about biweekly collections and the like have been pretty firmly rejected. That also goes for pay-as-you-throw or any other wheeze that makes people pay for rubbish collection when they are already getting stung for so much Council Tax. We will be continuing with a high-quality weekly collection, paid for out of existing Council Tax unless the Labour government uses legislation to put a gun to our heads. The trouble is that I wouldn’t put is past them.

Simon Heffer on Whelk Stalls

Simon Heffer has never run for elected office. Simon Heffer has never run a business of any size. However, Simon Heffer feels qualified to comment both politics and economics at great length and with great assurance. Now, a total lack of experience does not always disqualify a commentator from, well, commentating. After all, many of those who guide us through the maze of professional sports are not ex-professional sportsmen but journalists who have become knowledgeable through study and experience. Simon does not write like one of those though. He writes as if he is an ex-Prime Minister who also happens to be a self-made billionaire and guess what, he ain't. This brings us on to Simon's latest missive where he roundly condemns Labour's failure in Glasgow East and by extension their failure for the rest of the country. He then somehow mutates this into a pretty nasty attack on David Cameron using such phrases as 'economically ignorant' and 'old claptrap' to describe the Conservative leader's approach to rebalancing the economy after a decade of Labour misrule. This is not a measured critique; this is bar-room ranting from a man who a year ago was singing the praises of Gordon Brown and who has happily sat on a Labour government committee. Meanwhile in another part of the Telegraph there was an article by David Cameron laying out what Labour should do right now to help the British people as the economy slides of a cliff and pretty clearly laying out aspirations for a smaller and more efficient state that promotes individual responsibility and economic growth instead of strangling it. The contrast was stark: a man slurring his words after four pints on the one hand, insightful analysis tied to practical policy on the other. David Cameron is under no obligation to help the government out of the economic mess that they have made, in fact it is politically dangerous, but he did it anyway. That is because he is a leader, not a windbag.

This brings us on to basic politics. Simon's approach is ideological, with the axe falling and the pieces dropping where they may. Government spending is to be cut quickly and nothing else matters. Except that other things do matter, like maintaining good quality public services, and the secondary effects on the economy of firing people in large numbers, because that what slimming government means, also have to be managed. Anyone who has ever been is business will tell you that transforming an organisation, any organisation, to reduce costs while still keeping things moving forward is very difficult and it is almost impossible to do it very quickly. Of course, Simon has never been in business. There is also the small matter of the politics. Each of the general elections since 1997 has been fought by the Labour party on the theme of their investment versus Tory cuts. Oddly enough, David Cameron doesn't want to give his opponents any ammunition that would allow such a campaign against him next time, even allowing that public opinion has shifted from where it was in 1997. Of course, Simon has never been in politics. This brings us to the interesting question of why the Telegraph actually employs him? Actually, it is a matter of marketing. Somewhere in the back room of the Telegraph HQ there is a marketing department and one of the tools that they employ is customer segmentation. This is the art of taking a customer population and slicing it up into geodemographic chunks with witty names like 'shotguns and pickups' and 'struggling families' to better analyse their needs and wants and to provide for them, at least insofar as it promotes sales. So, the Telegraph will have noticed that they have a paper-buying segment called 'experienceless ideologues' and the word will have gone out to devote a certain amount of newsprint in cater for them. Step forward Simon Heffer, kept around in order to keep a minority of people like him ponying up 80p a day. The question is does he realise that this is his function? If so, maybe it is time to re-evaluate his writing as satire.