Thursday, 29 December 2011



Leave EU, Join NAFTA | Iain Murray & James Bennet
Apocalypse Could Be Now for €uro | Bill Jamieson
Morality Not Modernisation | Peter Oborne
The Year of Sound Money? | Douglas Carswell
iCam | Mail
However Much Dave Spends the Attack is Still Cuts | Dan Han
Newt and Israel | Robin Shepherd
The Quiet Man | Anna Raccoon
Pretty Bad Year for the Inbred, Nepotistic Labour Tribe | LabourList
Clegg Polling Better than Ed Miliband | Sun
Can the ECB Go Bust? | John Redwood
Hannan, Farage, Thatcher Most Popular on YouTube | BBC
To Succeed, Government Must be Willing to Fail | Ruth Porter
Margaret Thatcher Doesn’t Deserve a State Funeral | Peter Oborne
Ed Miliband Wrecked Labour Party Fundraiser | Dan Hodges
The Hypocrisy of Vince Scrooge and the Lib Dems | Quentin Letts
Nick Clegg is a Worse Deputy PM than John Prescott | Norman Tebbit
Your 5 Point Guide to Balls’s Shifting Position | Peter Hoskin
Why ‘Starving the Beast’ May Not Work | James Forsyth




UN Flies Flag at Half Mast for Dear Leader


2011: The Year of the ‘Pilgrim’


THURSDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2011

Second Policy Salvo Against Miliband
Mandelson Backed Think-Tank Launches Another Broadside

For the second time in a month Peter Mandelson’s think-tank, Policy Network, has launched a policy salvo against the direction the Labour Party is taking under Miliband. Mandelson privately is contemptuous of young Ed, these high-minded wonkish policy exhortations are the respectable manifestation of that contempt.

Last month his think-tank published “In the Black Labour: Why fiscal conservatism and social justice go hand-in-hand” is a discussion paper in which the authors; Graeme Cooke, Adam Lent, Anthony Painter and Hopi Sen, called for Labour to embrace fiscal conservatism. The paper was an explicit rebuttal of the kamikaze economics of Ed Balls endorsed by Ed Miliband, which poll after poll shows is not seen as credible by the public. Despite the state of the economy Cameron and Osborne are supported by the British public to a far greater extend than Miliband and Balls.

In exactly the same vein shadow pensions minister Gregg McClymont MP and Oxford historian Ben Jackson have written a paper for the think-tank warning that austerity governments often defeat opponents and that historically the Tories have achieved this on multiple occasions. They also urge Miliband to abandon his “predators and producers” rhetoric and ”put forward a more convincing strategy for private sector growth than the Conservatives”. McClymont and Jackson further warn that Ed Miliband must avoid the “tax and spend” trap and “a simple defence of the public sector and public spending”. Alas that is Labour policy in a nutshell..

See also: Labour-Centrists Laying Down Reality-Based Policy Ideas