Tory poll: Swing voters back “Red Ed” Miliband
Congratulations to Ed Miliband, who won the Labour leadership with a fantastic campaign.
He now faces the challenge of changing the Labour Party and making sure that it wins over the support of people who chose to vote Tory or Lib Dem in 2010. To achieve this, he should listen very carefully to research from one of Britain’s foremost electoral strategists.
Lord Ashcroft.
Ashcroft has just released research called “What future for Labour?” It includes data from more than 2,000 people who voted Labour in 2005, but who deserted the party in 2010. The results are absolutely staggering. continue reading… »
The media still attaches a stigma to mental health
contribution by Richard Shrubb
The stigma of mental illness needs to be tackled among the media itself, before the media can be effective in dealing with it among the public.
I have a story for sale on Mental Health First Aid (MHFA). It is about getting to someone experiencing distress and helping them out, in much the same way as you’d bandage their arm after the photocopier glass had cut them at work.
It has been used in major flooding events – one voluntary emergency organisation saw their shortcomings after some mass traumatic events, and got trained in MHFA.
continue reading… »
How online activism could transform our political culture
contribution by Hannah Lownsbrough
A vital source of hope for UK progressives facing a challenging new landscape is the rapid growth of our online presence.
Both the Australian Labor Party and the US Democrats achieved significant political recoveries in recent years with online initiatives such as MoveOn.org in the USA (www.moveon.org) and GetUp.org in Australia playing a key role.
continue reading… »
‘Red Ed’? The younger Miliband will go straight for the middle ground
Most discussion of Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign has been about three questions: the psychodrama of his decision to stand against his brother; the vague and usually unsubstantiated claims that he was lurching ultra-leftwards (please answer Next Left’s Red Ed challenge if you wish to propagate this), and, in the last fortnight, whether he could really win the horse race.
Ed Miliband’s political and policy agenda will surprise those who project a caricature on to him.
continue reading… »
Daily Mail goes for Ed Miliband’s family
In what will be a long line of attempts to rubbish the new Labour leader, The Daily Mail today started by focusing on Ed’s family and his apparent lack of “family values”.
.
But the couple’s relaxed stance on marriage stands in contrast to David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s ultra-traditional set-up.
Uh oh!
Daily Mail journalist Glen Owen says ominously:
Now Ms Thornton will feel the full glare of media interest in her style, behaviour and pronouncements.
We can’t wait…
Sunder Katwala thinks it will backfire.
But perhaps it is just a sign that Mail editorial overlord Paul Dacre is losing his appetite for British politics.
His dislike of David Cameron has rarely been carefully disguised. The Mail’s risibly absurd class and foreigner attacks on Nick Clegg during the election campaign often simply brought mockery to the Mail, and now he has to deal with this Coalition nonsense.
And Dacre didn’t even have the option of preferring the elder Milband to win the Labour leadership. It has been reported by Kevin Maguire that relations there were rather tense once the Mail decided it would be newsworthy (and no doubt enormously relevant to their political coverage) to try to buy the stories of the birth-mothers of David Miliband’s adopted children.
Ah, the defence of “family values” … I suppose that could be one word for it.
Paul Dacre never fails to surprise.
Ed Balls: “Our task now is to unite”
Ed Balls’ team have just sent out this email.
Dear friend,
I hope you will join me in congratulating Ed Miliband on being elected as the new leader of the Labour Party.
Our task now is to unite behind Ed Miliband, expose the unfair and economically reckless policies of the Tory-Liberal coalition and set out a radical and credible Labour alternative to win back the trust and support of the voters.
I want to thank the thousands of party and union members who voted for me and supported my campaign. And I’m particularly grateful to everybody who made a donation or volunteered to work on my campaign – from phoning members to leafleting at hustings. I can’t tell you how much that support has meant to me.
I’m proud that our campaign put policy issues like housing and jobs centre stage, that we took the fight to the coalition on school building cuts, Royal Mail privatisation and their dangerous economic policies and that we continued to pick up support from MPs and members even over this final week.
We need to defeat this coalition and win again for the millions of people who need a Labour government to stand up for them.
I’ll campaign just as hard to bring that about and I’m sure you will too.
Very best wishes and thanks again,
Ed ?
Now Ed Miliband needs to surprise his critics and supporters
Obviously I’m ecstatic that Ed Miliband has won the Labour leadership election, though I have said already I would have still been committed to a Labour win and supported the leader if David Miliband had.
But there are big, immediate challenges for Ed now, most notably to challenge the narrative CCHQ and the media will try and spring upon him.
The Conservatives have already declared, ‘This is the result we wanted’ – is if there was any chance they would have said otherwise. ‘Oh no, we didn’t get the right result, we’re going to lose the next election!‘
The media is already obsessed with pushing the view that unions won it for Ed. But it ignores how close Ed was all the way, and that this wasn’t a union block vote. It was ordinary shop-workers and middle-income workers from across the country who voted for Ed.
I have two key pieces of advice for Ed.
continue reading… »
Ed Miliband is selected leader of the Labour party!
It’s Ed!
Open thread – discuss your thoughts and reactions below.
David Miliband won the first round with 37.78% to Ed Miliband’s 34.33% – Diane Abbott was knocked out, and the second preferences of her voters redistributed.
In the second round, David won again, with 38.89%. Ed got 37.47%. Andy Burnham was knocked out and his votes redistributed.
In the third round, David won with 42.72% to Ed’s 41.26%. Ed Balls was knocked out and his votes redistributed, leaving only two candidates.
In the final round David fell behind with 49.35%. Ed won with 50.65%.
Could a Flat Tax could make Britain a more progressive place?
Everyone knows that Flat Taxes are nasty regressive things associated with the Adam Smith Institute, the reactionary-capitalist-pig-dog-enemy-of-the-people Tim Worstall and the ex-communist world.
What most people don’t know is that a flat income tax is much more progressive than the income tax which we currently charge people, as I’ll show below.
How Ken could win London again
Here’s a few stats which show what a difference good local campaigns make, as well as the task facing Ken in defeating Boris in the London Mayoral elections in 2012.
I’ve looked at five London constituencies which Ken lost in 2008, and which were close fights in the General Election in 2010 Labour and the Tories.
In some of these, Labour ran weak local campaigns with poor candidates, in others, they ran strong local campaigns with excellent candidates.
continue reading… »
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