I just like the idea that tears are something that need cleaning.

Meanwhile, the latest Populus poll has the lead at 7% :D

 

And a new batch of opinion polls in specific marginal seats shows very bad results for the Conservatives, including Crewe where Labour have a 13% lead, even though that seat is only 87th on their target list (i.e. beyond what they need to get a majority) :D

 

But the trend is downwards, there has been several lately showing a 4% lead so it is more likely that the 7% is a rogue poll

 

All the economy is going to do over the next 17 months is improve according to every significant economic indicator and the governer of the BOE so Labour have well and truly peaked

 

Add in pre election tax cuts (a certainty according to Boris) and the likelyhood of many UKIP supporters returning to the fold on election day and it makes it a question of how big the majority for Cameron will be or whether he will be stuck with the lib dems again not whether Ed will be pm

But the trend is downwards, there has been several lately showing a 4% lead so it is more likely that the 7% is a rogue poll

 

All the economy is going to do over the next 17 months is improve according to every significant economic indicator and the governer of the BOE so Labour have well and truly peaked

 

Add in pre election tax cuts (a certainty according to Boris) and the likelyhood of many UKIP supporters returning to the fold on election day and it makes it a question of how big the majority for Cameron will be or whether he will be stuck with the lib dems again not whether Ed will be pm

What does Boris know that Cameron doesn't? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/d...-of-decade.html

It's everything to do with efficiency, as I already said we have enough rooms. I wasn't suggesting forcing the elderly out of their houses at all, so thanks for putting words in my mouth there. A start would be a National Care Service with decent elderly accommodation available to all rather those who can afford private - carrot rather than the stick innit.

 

Also, I'm not sure how "doing everything they can to avoid building" works when the last Labour government introduced housing targets for local authorities including a proportion of affordable stock. I really hate to be partisan but it was the coalition who then scrapped the targets on the assumption that the private sector would build more without being told where to put it, and since housebuilding has gone down because it turns out the planners actually do know something after all. Oops.

 

there already are care centres with individual bedsit accommodation and on-site staff (usually for the poor rather than the well-off). Apologies if you feel I was putting words in your mouth but that's how it came over - well-off or house-owning folk are presumably the aim of your comment and I still maintain people don't wish to move out of their home especially if it means family and friends can no longer visit. It's different if physical disabilities are a factor (or lonely people), but otherwise why one earth would anyone want to hang around in blocks of other older people and exclude your family. What carrot exactly would be needed for that!? What about single-people owning a house? Why not apply the same logic to them? There's millions of 'em, why pick on the old?

 

Housing targets for local authorities under New Labour largely amounted to Housing association subsidies, which quickly become the new ghettos stuffed with problem families. Affordable Housing was aimed at "key-workers" rather than the public at large. As a borderline key-worker in the south, I can confirm there weren't terribly many options on offer (usually occasional part-ownership/part-rent) whatever the rhetoric and availability in Labour councils. Gordon Brown, I seem to recall, promised a couple of hundred thousand new homes and then hardly any were built. In terms of Council houses, I work for a Tory council and theyve only just really started building new ones over the last few years (there just is no land available without using green belt, and it wasn't a priority for the last 20 years). Trouble is, as fast as they build them they are sold off cheap under right to buy ( 5 years tenancy) for much less than they cost to buy, approx 40% - I keep a tally of the total council houses on the books and 2013 is now the lowest historical total on record - at a time when demand is 10 years waiting lists...

 

 

But the trend is downwards, there has been several lately showing a 4% lead so it is more likely that the 7% is a rogue poll

 

All the economy is going to do over the next 17 months is improve according to every significant economic indicator and the governer of the BOE so Labour have well and truly peaked

 

Add in pre election tax cuts (a certainty according to Boris) and the likelyhood of many UKIP supporters returning to the fold on election day and it makes it a question of how big the majority for Cameron will be or whether he will be stuck with the lib dems again not whether Ed will be pm

 

Anddddddd a few hours later...

 

Today's YouGov puts the Labour lead at 8% (41% to 33%).

Edited December 17, 201311 yr by Danny

:D!

there already are care centres with individual bedsit accommodation and on-site staff (usually for the poor rather than the well-off). Apologies if you feel I was putting words in your mouth but that's how it came over - well-off or house-owning folk are presumably the aim of your comment and I still maintain people don't wish to move out of their home especially if it means family and friends can no longer visit. It's different if physical disabilities are a factor (or lonely people), but otherwise why one earth would anyone want to hang around in blocks of other older people and exclude your family. What carrot exactly would be needed for that!? What about single-people owning a house? Why not apply the same logic to them? There's millions of 'em, why pick on the old?

 

Housing targets for local authorities under New Labour largely amounted to Housing association subsidies, which quickly become the new ghettos stuffed with problem families. Affordable Housing was aimed at "key-workers" rather than the public at large. As a borderline key-worker in the south, I can confirm there weren't terribly many options on offer (usually occasional part-ownership/part-rent) whatever the rhetoric and availability in Labour councils. Gordon Brown, I seem to recall, promised a couple of hundred thousand new homes and then hardly any were built. In terms of Council houses, I work for a Tory council and theyve only just really started building new ones over the last few years (there just is no land available without using green belt, and it wasn't a priority for the last 20 years). Trouble is, as fast as they build them they are sold off cheap under right to buy ( 5 years tenancy) for much less than they cost to buy, approx 40% - I keep a tally of the total council houses on the books and 2013 is now the lowest historical total on record - at a time when demand is 10 years waiting lists...

I "picked on" the old simply because it's believed that they as a demographic are responsible for the most unused bedrooms. I wasn't saying that other demographics don't have any.

 

And I take your point on the New Labour housing strategy, and believe I'd have done far more and I'm pleased that Ed Miliband appears keen to do so. I just don't understand where this "trying all they can to avoid building more" idea came in when housing targets, flawed or not, were a deliberate step towards making councils stick to their promises.

I "picked on" the old simply because it's believed that they as a demographic are responsible for the most unused bedrooms. I wasn't saying that other demographics don't have any.

 

And I take your point on the New Labour housing strategy, and believe I'd have done far more and I'm pleased that Ed Miliband appears keen to do so. I just don't understand where this "trying all they can to avoid building more" idea came in when housing targets, flawed or not, were a deliberate step towards making councils stick to their promises.

 

Miliband needs to state clearly:

 

all councils will be obliged to build enough council housing to greatly reduce waiting lists

 

right to buy will be killed dead

 

green belt and NIMBYS not to have the right to block new housing if no other land is available (preferably first choice brown-belt and unused un-needed open space - not nature reserves though and the like)

 

no appearing to be in favour, make it a policy that he's GOING to do it, guaranteed.

 

He won't though because of the knock-on effects it will have on the banks debts and house prices, so it'll just be tinkering around the edges like New Labour...

 

just my prediction, we'll see over the next 12 months.. B-)

 

 

Anddddddd a few hours later...

 

Today's YouGov puts the Labour lead at 8% (41% to 33%).

 

Definitely a rogue poll or outlier ;)

 

Unemployment fell by 99,000 today, the good news just keeps flooding in

 

Its taking time for people to truly thank the tories but i am confident that by March we will be leading in some polls

Definitely a rogue poll or outlier ;)

 

Unemployment fell by 99,000 today, the good news just keeps flooding in

 

Its taking time for people to truly thank the tories but i am confident that by March we will be leading in some polls

Wait, are you really having the nerve to call the one with an eight point lead the outlier and take the two point lead one seriously? Barely any YouGov polls have shown a two point lead. There have been countless YouGov polls over the last few weeks that have shown an eight point lead and one showing a twelve point lead in the last ten days. On that basis the lead is far more likely to be closer to 6-8 points than to two.

Wait, are you really having the nerve to call the one with an eight point lead the outlier and take the two point lead one seriously? Barely any YouGov polls have shown a two point lead. There have been countless YouGov polls over the last few weeks that have shown an eight point lead and one showing a twelve point lead in the last ten days. On that basis the lead is far more likely to be closer to 6-8 points than to two.

 

The trend is downwards though, there were several polls at the end of last week/weekend showing the lead at 4 points so what has happened since then that would double the lead? with further good economic news this week it is far more credible to believe a 2 point lead than a doubling of the recent trend

 

 

To be honest, no poll asks a statistically significant number of people anyway. So they're probably both outliers.

Well, Labour have managed to have a good run of nearly 3 months without scoring any own-goals, but I guess it was inevitable that Balls or another of the blinkered NewLabourites would blunder into their own way again eventually:

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/...tment-cuts-2015

 

It seems they've still not learnt that, literally EVERY time over the past few years they've tried to turn the party into a technocratic, passionless, Tory-lite party of "credibility" and "budget discipline", the poll ratings have gone DOWN *sigh*

I wish they'd realise that absolutely nobody buys the Tory BS that craig insists on spinning about the growing economy and seize the opportunity to prove that they would do something different to grow the economy, easy the rising cost of living crisis, stop the widening of the poverty gap and show that they've learned from their last stint in government and would be more disciplined with their money.

I wish they'd realise that absolutely nobody buys the Tory BS that craig insists on spinning about the growing economy and seize the opportunity to prove that they would do something different to grow the economy, easy the rising cost of living crisis, stop the widening of the poverty gap and show that they've learned from their last stint in government and would be more disciplined with their money.

 

Agreed. Sadly, I think Ed Balls is the main problem, and I'm starting to hope he gets sacked as shadow chancellor sometime next year and replaced with someone who actually has a better idea of what people want to hear.

 

**

 

6% lead for Labour in the last poll of 2013. That means the Tories have not had a lead in a single opinion poll this year (not a one) which is the first time that's happened since 2002 #swingback

Edited December 22, 201311 yr by Danny

Agreed. Sadly, I think Ed Balls is the main problem, and I'm starting to hope he gets sacked as shadow chancellor sometime next year and replaced with someone who actually has a better idea of what people want to hear.

I don't expect you to agree with a single word in there (and obviously I imagine you'll wildly differ with the author on his view of the fiscal challenges facing the next government and how to tackle them), but there was an interesting piece on the dilemma faced by the Party t'other day...

I don't expect you to agree with a single word in there (and obviously I imagine you'll wildly differ with the author on his view of the fiscal challenges facing the next government and how to tackle them), but there was an interesting piece on the dilemma faced by the Party t'other day...

 

Correct :P

 

I still maintain that, in my experience, people rarely complain about Labour not being "credible" on spending (ESPECIALLY not using the exact words "credibility" and "competence" which the political journalists are obsessed with). Far more common are people saying things like "what's actually the point of Labour?" or "I've got no idea what Labour would actually be doing if they were in government". I think I quoted an article from Progress thinktank a while back, which was based on a focus group asking people to imagine the Labour Party as a person, and people just couldn't imagine "Mr Labour Party" at all (whereas almost everyone said they imagined "Mr Conservative Party" to be a rich snob wearing an uber-expensive suit, smoking cigars and listening to Michael Buble--but in some ways, even a negative clearly-defined image is better than having no image atall). I often see people like Hopi Sen and that utter moron Dan Hodges saying things like "people know Labour's heart is in the right place, so there's no point Labour showing they care about ordinary people because people already know they would do that", but I actually think that's far too complacent - people don't necessarily think Labour's heart is in the right place, they don't have any idea what the hell Labour is about atall. So rambling on about "zero-based spending reviews" and "budget discipline", in addition to pushing a fundamentally Tory issue to the top of the agenda and just making people think it's even more important, only makes Labour seem even more aloof and technocratic and does nothing to establish what Labour's "raison d'etre" is.

 

(And yet, inspite of all these problems, they're still ahead in the polls, which just shows how rank-unpopular the Conservatives are, before Craig jumps in.)

 

That Hopi Sen article talks approvingly of how Ed Balls "has been the most willing of all in the shadow cabinet to spell out how horrible the next labour government will have to be", as if it would make Labour sound more "credible" and more likely to vote for them. Actually, if you look at the polling evidence, there was a sharp fall in Labour's poll ratings the two main times he did that - in early 2012 where he said he thought public-sector workers should have their pay frozen, which just infuriated he people who'd been most loyal to Labour (and is still the last time to date Labour have been behind in the polls); and of course, this year's summer of U-turns, where he and Miliband suddenly announced they were copying Tory economic policies but only succeeded in copying the Tories' poll ratings. By contrast, Labour's most popular moves over the entire past few years were when they did more left-wing things: the energy-price freeze, and being brave enough to outright oppose the Conservatives' cutting the 50p tax rate (apparently against the advice of Balls and Blair who thought it would make Labour "anti-aspiration" or some nonsense). You can read too much into one standalone poll movement, but when it's a pattern that keeps repeating itself over and over again, one has to be pretty wilfully blind to still argue what people want is for Labour to be more like the Conservatives.

 

On top of all that, Balls is one of the worst examples of what I'm always going on about, politicians who look like they're just treating it like it's a game. Speaking aggressively, using statistics and technicalities to try and trip up George Osborne, just looking like he's trying to look strong rather than genuinely trying to act in the best interests of people. To the extent the average person is aware of him at all, I imagine he would come across terribly. In these times where people instinctively don't trust politicians' motives, it's not enough to just be right on the substance, you also need to convince people that you think you're trying to act on their behalf and do the best for them, rather than just trying to score points for their political "team" - the tone and how you phrase what you say, matters almost as much as the actual content (I do think EdM is starting to understand this, in fairness). Yvette Cooper would be a bit better presentationally since she atleast seems to make an effort, when she's opposing government policies, to sound like she's actually concerned on the public's behalf, although I worry if her politics would be the same as Ed Balls's. Andy Burnham would be even better in both respects.

 

 

</rant>

Edited December 22, 201311 yr by Danny

The issue there is that it's a bit of a double bind. Your critique would be fine and I'd agree by now if the only thing that mattered were the election campaign - as we know after about a year or two of trying that commitments to fiscal credibility just aren't going to have much breakthrough electorally for Labour, as the image of Ed Balls and Ed Miliband is far too settled in the minds of voters for there to be any change in that respect. The Conservatives won that definition and there's not much that can be done about it, so claims to fiscal credibility from Labour now don't change m/any minds for those in the centre and piss off a lot of the core vote, so the only gains are marginal at best (which could still matter, but I'd hazard by now that I'd agree with you that they're a net loss). It's too close to the next election for any option but doubling down on the progressive majority Lib Dem lovebombing strategy to work, as it's the only one which will guard against any swingback.

 

That said - I agree that the progressive majority strategy is now the only option that is likely to work, and that that kind of rhetoric and the policies it would entail are the only way Labour can win the next election. But the only way I see that going is that Prime Minister Ed Miliband would end up having the same fate as President Hollande - because fiscal restraint is an inevitability for any government after the next election unless we hit a massive boom, for the reasons outlined by that Fabian Review, and rejecting fiscal restraint totally is something I can't see working during a time of growth when we're still running a deficit larger than that even envisioned by the Darling Plan thanks to the Conservatives taking such a short-sighted view on what to do in a recession. Stimulus is vital in the bad times, but it's going to be incredibly difficult to make the case for increased deficit spending during a period of growth - after all, the Keynesian dictum was to save in the good times so we can stimulate in the bad.

 

I'm not really one to fear market consequences when it comes to deficit spending during a recession as I think the consequences of doing nothing for fear of the markets in a recession are far worse than stimulating and getting a slap on the wrist at worst from the markets for doing so. I don't really see any way that increased spending while already running deficits would be sustainable during a period of growth without commensurate broad tax increases on everybody, not just those on the top rate. Which works if it's hypothecated (I was quite pleased to see the National Care Service funded by a hypothecated tax increase went down well in that Progress focus group piece, as it's a policy I'd like to see and which I think would be accepted so long as it's funded), but would probably have pretty dreadful results for an elected Labour Party in 2020 if it was just used as a blank cheque for increases in spending in areas like welfare, where even within the progressive (god I hate that word) majority there isn't unanimous agreement on the virtues of that spending (take the old chestnut of 80-something% of Unite members agreeing with the welfare cap and so on), and if we were still running a deficit by that point as well. We were in a position to borrow a lot at the beginning of the last recession as there was strong market confidence that we were a safe lending prospect. I can't see that still being the case by the next recession if we haven't managed to close the deficit and run a surplus at any time until that point, and I think it's pretty vital that any government ensures that the confidence in the markets is there so that we can borrow to fund stimulus spending at a low rate in any future recession.

 

I'd say that if the policy programmes of those who want Labour to be bolder were adopted, we're actually in a pretty unique position now of a gutted Liberal Democrats and a right-wing vote splintered by Ukip that could allow that policy programme to be elected. I couldn't see that government remaining popular for long due to the need for either more austerity or big tax rises to pay for that policy programme.

Well, whether it's a good economic strategy is a different debate to whether it's a good political strategy. I would argue the big difference between Hollande and a Labour government would be we wouldn't be bounced into making cuts by Germany, which is where the real pressure came on Hollande--after all, "the markets" were saying for years that the UK still having a deficit as high as we do now would be horrific, and yet, now it's happened, these horrific consequences have not materialised. But I won't claim to know for sure, I think the last few years have shown even the professional economists have little idea of what will happen in the future.

 

But even if the economics is debateable, it's just beyond debate now that, politically, people don't want Labour to be some Tory-lite party when it comes to the economy. The problem is loads of these Labour frontbenchers are still stuck in the 1990s, when people did generally think the Tories' economic policies were broadly right, even if they would ideally want the rich to pay more tax they accepted that the super-rich needed to be kept onside to keep the economy going, and some people in the middle did have aspirations that they would eventually rise up the ladder and so didn't want "government getting in their way" .... it's very different now, people are furious at big businesses and banks holding the rest of us to ransom, they think it's totally unacceptable for the super-rich to not pay their way no matter how much they (nominally) contribute to the economy, people in the middle no longer think it's at all realistic that they might one day climb to the top of the ladder and their aspirations just amount to getting some help to keep going and stop themselves falling down the ladder, and people are sick and tired of governments throwing their hands up and saying there's nothing they can do to bring the global "Davos elite" into line. If Labour just goes into the election promising to preserve the status quo with a few tinkers here and there (as the likes of Balls seem to want), their voters will either not vote or simply drift off to parties who promise to symbolically smash the hated status quo - even UKIP, no matter how counterintuitive it might seem given they don't want to tackle the "Davos elite" either, people are just so desperate to go for something, anything, that's different to how things are now. Regardless of whether it's realistic or not, that's what people want from politicians right now, not dry "credibility" or "competence".

Edited December 22, 201311 yr by Danny

What does this Fabian Review actually aim to prevent - is it the continued rise in debt-to-GDP ratio or is it more an expansion of government spending? Of course, to prevent the former all you need is a boom or (election-suicide?) tax rises. I honestly think the UK's economy has the capacity for one in the medium term. London's position as a world city has only strengthened in the last few decades, and will continue to do so, and as long as some sense is employed, spillover to other urban areas in the same country is surely inevitable. A completely scientific analysis, I realise.

 

I think we will still be an equally credible country to lend to, come the next time we need to borrow substantially, too. Perhaps the forthcoming addition of many more countries to such a credibility will mean we'll not stand out as much, but I don't see how that'll change the interest rate at which we'll be able to borrow.

 

It seems obvious to me that taking a Tory-lite stance on government spending won't really benefit Labour. Similarly, it was you, Tyron, claiming that the Tories moving towards UKIP's stance on this EU fiasco will only legitimise their policies / legitimise UKIP as a party rather than win back voters defected from the Tories, eh? Because that seems to be exactly what's happened.