Trade unions

Today’s press will not have made happy reading for Ed Miliband and his supporters. Alan Johnson’s comments to The Times about the need to change the way Labour elects its leader has revived the debate about the legitimacy of Ed Miliband’s victory. Meanwhile in the New Statesman there’s a piece setting out the internal tensions within the party. Intriguingly, Lisa Tremble, who was David Miliband’s press chief during his leadership campaign, has put what could be considered a rather provocative quote on the record. She tells the magazine, ‘David’s rediscovered his excitement in politics…He’s looking forward to the new challenges. He’s not going anywhere.’ As I say in the new

At last, The Guardian is reporting the grassroots rebellion in education. It has picked up on the story of Fiona Murphy who blogged on Coffee House yesterday about her trouble with the Tory-run council in Bromley. But hang on… the “grassroots revolt” of which the Guardian speaks is the councils, trying to protect their monopoly control over state schools. Here is the extract: “A flagship government policy has provoked a grassroots revolt against the coalition, with senior Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors lining up to attack the introduction of free schools, one of education secretary Michael Gove’s most cherished projects…Coalition councillors are fighting the education secretary’s plans, claiming that they

Derek Simpson has had a Damascene conversion. The gnarled bruiser, famous for telling Alistair Darling to ‘tax the bankers out of existence’, has backed Les Bayliss, the moderate candidate in the race to lead Unite. According to Sophy Ridge at the News of the World, Simpson added: ‘Ranting and raving from the side lines will only keep Labour in opposition for a generation. The cuts announced this week are the tip of a very nasty iceberg but the task of opposing them will be complex. Only one candidate standing in the Unite general secretary election has in my mind the skills for this difficult job.  Les Bayliss has the skills and

The warnings from Auntie’s leading hacks have been heeded – the strike has been cancelled. There is no done deal and the government is still in the union’s crosshairs: the strike has been delayed to the 19th and 20th October, the day of the comprehensive spending review, pending further consultation. All this raises a few points. First, Ed Miliband scores by having urged the NUJ to drop its plans in favour of impartiality – very New Politics, now matter how opportunistic the initial impulse to further debase the moniker ‘Red Ed’. The BBC has, for the moment, denied its detractors a major publicity coup, not that I think that Jeremy

Amongst BBC political staff, there’s mounting concern about the plans for a strike during Tory conference. One of them said to me at Labour conference that they just didn’t know what to do, they had been put in an impossible position by the decision to call the strike on such politically important days. These journalists fear that striking during Tory conference would undermine the corporation’s reputation for impartiality. So, a whole host of them wrote to their union rep asking him to make representations on their behalf. His reply shows just the level of hostility these people — who are just trying to do their job — are up against:

There is a reason why the coalition has used the Lib Dem conference to step up its rhetoric about the bankers and their bonuses. The coalition believes, rightly, that balancing the budget is a matter of political economy. It is acutely aware, and has been for some time, that the sight of banks paying out huge bonuses later this year just as the public sector begins to lay people off and cut services would be disastrous. This view is shared by everyone in the coalition from Cable to Osborne. Bumper bonuses would increase calls for new punitive measures against the banks and produce precisely the kind of political atmosphere that

Watch or read much of the economics coverage in Britain and you sometimes get the sense that we’re entering the final round of a peculiar game. Let’s call it ‘Russian Roulette for Economists’. The rules are simple: teams of academics and economically-literate politicos line up on either side of an issue and hurl abuse at one another. The winner will be declared when something significant changes in the macro-economic position of the UK. The game was played when Britain entered the ERM (those who said it would be a disaster won). The current double dip debate is another example. This time, the principal players on one side are the former