Blog articles tagged with Ed Miliband

Heavy on the problems, light on the solutions

by Caroline Crampton / 23 May 2011 14:57

“Excuse me, but does anyone know how much longer we’re expected to wait here?” she shouted. “I know our time isn’t ‘valuable’ or anything, but this is just outrageous!”

This was how Ed Miliband’s ‘Promise of Britain” speech got underway today. Twenty minutes after the Labour leader was supposed to have started, the assembled members of the public and press were still waiting for him to appear.

The woman who stood up

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David Miliband finds his voice

by Caroline Crampton / 23 May 2011 10:06

This is a week for global politics. Obama is coming to visit, and we all know how excited everybody gets when the king of hope and change is on the same continent as us.

With the Arab Spring, the increased focus on the Israel-Palestine conflict and the death of Osama bin Laden, insightful commentary on foreign affairs from a UK perspective has never been more in demand.

And David Miliband, former foreign

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Ken Clarke (and others) on rape

by Caroline Crampton / 18 May 2011 12:05

The row kicked off with these proposals on rape sentencing. The consultation is still going on, but it has been proposed that an early guilty plea could spare rape victims the ordeal of giving evidence and increase the conviction rate. Convicted rapists could also see their sentences reduced if they submitted an early guilty plea.

Ken Clarke then appeared on BBC5Live at 10.30 to defend the proposals. He said that the idea

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A week of parliamentary nonsense

by Martin Shapland / 13 May 2011 10:09

Is it just me, or have we had a strange week?

The referendum and local elections has tipped politics upside down and no-one’s quite found their feet just yet.

David Willetts is still standing on his head after suffering a frontal lobotomy on one of his two brains. The Tory university minister decided to follow up fantastic results on 5 May by floating the idea that rich people could buy their

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Party leaders and celebs fail to impact on AV

by Samantha Tomaszczyk / 05 May 2011 16:01

When it comes to fashion, hair and handbags, celebrities have a huge amount of influence over us.

But it seems when it comes to politics – or AV referendums at least – celebrities are failing to make an impact.

In a recent YouGov survey for the Sun, people were asked which side of the debate 12 different people, including celebrities, were on. Some of the results are quite worrying: only 59% realised

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All you need to know about AV

05 May 2011 11:31

Amber Elliott went inside both campaigns and found a maze of claim and counter-claim as well as some fervent activists

You can read full transcripts of her interviews with No campaign head Matthew Elliott, Lib Dem President Tim Farron, No to AV digital strategists Jag Singh and Lara Smallman and Lib Dem MP and Yes

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Has Ed given up on AV already?

by Caroline Crampton / 03 May 2011 13:20

I’ve just come back from Ed Miliband’s press conference, which was billed as “the final press conference of this local election”. Harriet Harman even took to the stage to tell us about some encounters she’d had with voters on the doorstep.

Unfortunately for Labour, very few of the assembled journalists appeared at all interested in what the pair had to say about the local elections. Instead, almost all of the questions were concerned

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Cameron’s remark ‘calm down dear’ wasn’t sexist

by Caroline Crampton / 28 Apr 2011 11:43

The royal wedding is almost here. News editors all over the country fought with their consciences last night as they pondered the eternal dilemma – do I go with a royal wedding splash, or give space to the fact that David Cameron told a female MP to “calm down, dear” during PMQs yesterday?

For a full account of what happenened, I recommend Amber’s report from the press gallery. Since there’s been such

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‘Purple Labour’ leads new party debates

by Ben Duckworth / 19 Apr 2011 14:44

This morning’s press conference by the Labour leader concentrated on tuition fees with the claim the Tories have “broken” their promise that the £9,000 upper limit would only be charged in “exceptional circumstances”. In the following Q&A session I asked Ed Miliband about what contribution he would like to see from ‘Purple Labour’ – the name for a group of formerly-known-as Blairite Labour members who are publishing a moderniser’s manifesto through Progress and

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The downfall of Mrs Duffy

by Harry Cole / 12 Apr 2011 15:34

When Rochdale pensioner Mrs Duffy went out to get a pint of milk on the 29 April last year, little did she know that her simple probing would encapsulate, in a word, what media commentaters and pundits had been trying to explain for all the years that Gordon Brown was at the forefront of British politics.

Brown’s spiteful dismissal of Duffy as a “bigot” confirmed what many had known for years, but had

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David Davis and David Miliband - thwarted by AV

by Caroline Crampton / 12 Apr 2011 14:10

Courtesy of a tip-off from one of the QI elves (the backroom brains who come up with all those clever factoids for Stephen Fry to say on television), I’ve been looking again at the data for both the Conservative leadership election in 2005 and the Labour contest in 2010, and it seem to be the case that had they been conducted using the same voting system we currently use to elect MPs, David Davis and

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