Daily View: What now for the Labour party?
Political bloggers pick out the most interesting bits of the Labour party conference so far and make their predictions.
One of the first policies to come out of the conference is a call to reduce the top level of student fees to £6,000 a year. this is "political genius":
"By keeping the debate over tuition fees in the forefront of the political debate, he will be reminding everyone of the £9,000 figure that potential students don't like. This in turn is likely to depress applications.
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"For universities, Miliband's move in the short term adds to the risk that applications and hence income may decline. It also undermines those who have been saying that universities now have a secure and stable future (John Browne, where are you?). In fact, their financing seems now to be highly vulnerable to the tossing of political storms."
But if a tax on bankers would be wasted on tuition fees:
"What's much more interesting is how we're going to pay for it [reduced student fees]. We're going to take on the banks by taxing them more than the Tories would. I suspect this will be rather popular.
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"However, with the economy on the edge of recession, a desperate hunger for jobs, and demand as visible as a democratically elected member of the SWP, I did wonder what made us decide that the top priority for that rare and beautiful thing - a popular tax increase - was the repayment terms for graduate loans in a decade's time? We've caught a Unicorn in a net, and we're using it to somewhat modify student debt levels in the medium term."
As part of marking the opening of the Labour conference, Ed Miliband appeared on the Andrew Marr show. the interview and concludes that the most striking thing is, separating himself from the shadow chancellor Ed Balls, he doesn't complain about cuts:
"You don't hear him talk about Ed Balls' 'too hard, too fast' cuts, just a reference to 'the government's strategy'. Balls tells porkies, of course, and I think Miliband is a bit more honest. So he can't quite bring himself to blame cuts, given that state spending in the first year of the coalition was the highest in British history."
that Ed Miliband has two options for the Labour party:
"When a party is down there are two paths to recovery. One is to admit the truth about your own past failings and to speak the truth about the country's problems. The Labour Party have obviously decided not to go for that option; so that leaves the second path - plan B, if you like - which is to whip up a tidal wave of hype and ride it all the way. Its advantage over the first path is that intellectual honesty is not required, the disadvantage is that a charismatic leader - such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair or Barack Obama - most certainly is."
Finally, imagines a Labour conference with policies out of the US drama the West Wing:
"Labour's new generation would not weaken the nation's prosperity by setting itself against the idea of markets. Instead, we will be prepared to take whatever difficult action is necessary to create genuinely free and fair markets that work for all. Labour will be a party that believes in government acting forcefully where necessary, compared to a Tory-led administration that is leaving people to fend for themselves. But we will ultimately be committed to increasing social justice by giving away power to the powerless rather than hoarding the levers of state action in Whitehall.
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The problem with the Bartlet [West Wing character] 'stand up for big government, win big' campaign strategy, is that it is a fiction. A beautiful fiction, but a fiction nevertheless."
