Labour | The Horsell's Mouth

Harman courts controversy

Come on Harriet, it's only £350

When Jonathan Aitken, a junior minister in the last Conservative government, fell foul of the criminal law you couldn’t escape the wall-to-wall coverage of it.

For those who missed, yesterday Harriet Harman – a cabinet minister and deputy leader of the Labour Party, pleaded guilty to bashing [...]

Faint praise

Faint praise from the future powerbrokers

A decent performance at PMQs doesn’t mean much when your own party starts tearing into you a few minutes later. The PM is in real trouble at the moment, not because people love DC or because of the polls but because a large section of his own [...]

A matter of security

It seems that there were a few hacks back at the BBC yesterday and today as someone has had time to stitch together a toadying news story about Gordon Brown, giving him carte blanche to attack everyone else based on a tepid interview he gave to Andrew Marr. He’s also led the bulletins throughout [...]

Sky is the limit

Only class war to offer voters

No such slacking over at Sky News, where clearly the fact that the company doesn’t get a £3.5bn windfall from the government every year means that journos have to be in over the New Year period.

It doesn’t seem to have made them any less subservient to [...]

Hutton for punishment

John Hutton

Up until yesterday, I didn’t care much for John Hutton – a particularly strident Blairite who failed to make any impact at all in work and pensions, business and regulatory reform and defence. Quite a list of cabinet jobs to be rubbish at.

However, the revelation that he was able, along [...]

Finished in America

A little while ago, the PM liked to remind us how the recession started in America and wasn’t really the fault of anyone in the UK (even the bankers). He also assured us that the UK was best placed to deal with the recession and that we would come out of it strongly, ahead [...]

Halving the deficit

One of the key things in the the Pre-Budget Report was the headline to “halve Britain’s deficit” during the next four years, bringing this down from 12% of GDP where it currently stands (up from 2% in 2007) to 6.5%. In other words we are going to reduce the £180bn-a-year borrowing levels to something [...]

Tracking the story

There’s been quite a bit in the nationals recently about the narrowing of the polls, with some putting the Labour lead in single figures. It’s not hugely surprising, I think we are see the Eurosceptic Conservative contingent flipping over to UKIP, which are votes I don’t necessarily think will stay there at the polling [...]

Don’t bank on it

While people decry banking bonuses, they are ignoring the real threat posed to our financial advantage by the appointment of Michael Barnier as Commissioner for the Single Market. I’m furious that for the sake of having some nonentity like Baroness Ashton appointed to a puffed-up, non-elected position mandated by a treaty that most of Europe [...]

If only they’d learn

Michael Gove understands strategy rather than splurge

…That throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve it unless you have the correct strategy to resolve the core issues. For Labour, far too many times the distinction between resources and strategy has not been made and extra resources has been the strategy. In the NHS, [...]

The Horsell's Mouth

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