Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, has moved to challenge accusations that Labour is not credible on the economy by telling the public sector unions that he endorses George Osborne’s public sector pay freeze until the end of the parliament, and that he accepts every spending cut…

“My starting point is, I am afraid, we are going to have keep all these cuts. There is a big squeeze happening on budgets across the piece. The squeeze on defence spending, for instance, is £15bn by 2015. We are going to have to start from that being the baseline. At this stage, we can make no commitments to reverse any of that, on spending or on tax. So I am being absolutely clear about that.”

If Balls and Labour stick to that, this signals a big change in Labour’s approach to opposition.

Except perhaps that it isn’t new, or fresh.

From http://www.fresh-ideas.org.uk/culture-media-and-sport. Hat-tip: Graham Neale

Remember when MiliE described them as a ‘disgrace to the traditions of liberalism’? Since then he has said that, actually, he’d work with the Lib Dems so long as they ditched Clegg; that he’d work with them even if they kept Clegg; that … oh, you get the picture. And now this [a piece by Douglas Alexander]: the closest that Labour have come, in spirit at least, to matching the ‘big, open, comprehensive offer’ that Cameron made at the end of last year’s general election. The headline of Alexander’s Statesman piece is even that ‘Labour will make a big, open offer to the Lib Dems on Europe’.

I say “official” because it’s not a change of mood that is shared by all in the Labour Party (or indeed, to be fair, welcomed by all in the Liberal Democrats either).

For here is a confident prediction about what it won’t contain: there will be no announcement that Labour is putting down a no-confidence motion in the government and calling on the Liberal Democrats to vote Cameron out of Number 10 before October is out.

Consider the world through Labour eyes: day after day they tell us how awful the Tories are and how decent Liberal Democrats should really see themselves as colleagues of the Labour movement. Moreover there is no Conservative majority in Parliament.

And yet… despite votes of no confidence having been the means for bringing down governments without a majority in the past, and even often used in the face of a clear one-party majority, the idea that Parliament might be about to vote Cameron out and force the creation of a new government is not on anyone’s list of predictions.

The reason for its absence tells us something about British politics in general and something about Labour in particular. For British politics the lesson is a simple one: decades of talk about how hung Parliaments bring instability have turned to dust very quickly. The widespread expectation is that a coalition can instead last a full five years, with the brief fuss over some of Tim Farron’s loose language during the Liberal Democrat conference being a matter of a few months here or there, not the basic idea of a multi-year coalition.

As for Labour, despite the vehemence of much of the party’s rhetoric about the government, it is not champing at the bit to get back into power before Christmas. That shows a shrewd understanding of the party’s current state and the lessons of history, for working out what the party is for, which policies from the last government to keep and which to ditch, and how to present their leader as a plausible Prime Minister, are all tasks which usually take years to get right.

But even so, if you had asked before the general election whether, in the face of a hung Parliament and a government it deeply dislikes, the Labour Party would not have really been bothered about voting the government out of office, how many people would have said yes?

Cross-posted from the MHP Communications blog.

Has ordered all Labour councillors and council officials, including the press office, not to talk to either newspaper. (Liverpool Echo)

A curious twist is that the leaked document was legal advice from Cherie Blair, which the council claims was subsequently contradicted by further advice given to it by … Cherie Blair. To add to the confusion, local newspapers have pointed out that when they contacted the council about the story before running it this second legal advice was not mentioned at all.

As a result, two local newspaper editors have said,

We still await and would welcome evidence that this second document exists.

There are serious questions about the way the interim Chief Executive appointment was made but it did make me smile to see the last paragraph of the Liverpool Echo’s story:

When asked to confirm or deny that Cllr Anderson had ordered the council not to make comment to the two newspapers, a council spokesman declined to comment.

Step two: you put in a back claim for three years worth of travel, including numerous first class travel trips, totalling £20,000.

Step three: your embarrassed Labour colleagues say they’ll vote you out of office if you don’t resign first.

Details here and here.

A post from me…

Economic statistic of the week: how the cuts compare

A Parliamentary answer has revealed how, when it comes to most services, it turns out Labour was planning bigger cuts than the government:

Against the benchmark of what public spending would have been if welfare rules and the like had been left unchanged and other public expenditure increased in line with inflation (i.e. DEL spending increased in line with inflation, AME spending based on no rule changes), Labour was planning to cut spending by £56 billion.

By contrast, the Coalition Government is planning to cut spending by £81 billion. The difference between these two figures is made up of:

Higher efficiency savings: £7 billion
Welfare and related savings: £18 billion
Lower national debt interest payments: £3 billion

… but also higher departmental spending (DEL) by the Coalition compared to Labour’s plans of £2 billion.

Read the full post here.

… and a post from someone else

Al Jazeera: Leading The Citizen Media Revolution

Charlie Beckett points out the key role that Al Jazeera has played in the Middle East unrest. Its rolling news service has relied on but also magnified the coverage available via social media and widespread cheap cameras:

Al Jazeera’s Qatar-based 14 person team devoted to social media serves the English and Arabic website and newsroom teams. I was surprised at the lengths they went to verify the material and to confirm the identity and location of, for example, any Tweet-based information…

As a media organisation, this has been a break through moment for Al Jazeera, in the same way that CNN’s coverage of the first Gulf War gave it pre-eminent global media profile.

Read the full post from Charlie Beckett here.

It’s a tremendously well put together piece, using music in a powerful and ironic way (at a time when Labour was trying to wrest the reputation of being the patriotic party from the Conservatives) and built around showing the viewer the leading figures of another party celebrating at their own party conference. Showcasing your opponents in this way doesn’t usually work, but they were unusual political times. The broadcast’s impact will, I suspect, be much less now for people who didn’t live through the politics of that era, though even so it helps explain some of the very strong emotional reactions to political events since the 2010 general election.

When watching, keep an eye out for how Ken Clarke used to be a high profile unpopular Conservative cabinet minister. Repeatedly losing the Conservative Party leadership, but doing so with grace and humility and without in-between times plotting, has helped transform his public character in the intervening years.

Also available on YouTube here.

(For my other posts on party political broadcasts, including move clips, see my Party Political Broadcasts page.)

During tense negotiations over Britain’s EU budget rebate in 2005, the former prime minister became so exasperated with the Treasury that he kidnapped its man in Brussels.

Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff, relates the hilarious story…

“Given the Treasury’s refusal to share information with us, we had real trouble working out what the financial implications for Britain of the Luxembourg proposal would be. In desperation, we kidnapped the Treasury’s expert at the UK mission in Brussels and took him with us to Luxembourg so that he could explain to us what the offer really meant.

“He was enormously relieved when we finally let him go. He didn’t mind that he was being dumped in Paris, the next stop on our trip, without a passport or any money. He just wanted our assurance that we wouldn’t tell the Treasury that he had been travelling with us: that would blight his career for ever.”

It’s not quite all a matter of ancient history now as Ed Miliband was one of the inner Gordon Brown entourage for years. He has somehow managed to avoid being burdened with that record in the way that Ed Balls has, even though he keeps on cropping up right at the heart of the Brown operation in the memoirs that have appeared since the election. But it does leave a very big question mark over the judgement of Ed Miliband (and many others) that none of this was enough for them to think that backing Gordon Brown to be Prime Minister was the wrong move.