My party must change.Frank Field,
marc jacobs wallets, the Labour former welfare minister, has put out a statement warmly welcoming Miliband's message.Ed Miliband today begins to redefine what Labour means by fairness and so begins the long haul of building a new coalition of voters straddling both working and middle class voters. It signals the end of Labour's attack on the working class moral economy that has always believed benefits should be largely based on contributions and not decided simply on terms of need. It is difficult to overestimate how significant today's speech is.I'm now off to the Downing Street lobby briefing. I'll post again after 11.30am.11.38am: I'm back from the Number 10 lobby briefing.
" But Clarke defended the idea in the Commons. When Labour's Sadiq Khan urged him last month during justice questions to drop the plan, Clarke replied:We are going to give the outcome of our consultation shortly,
kate spade outlet, but I think that that proposal is likely to survive. This was a proposal with clear government support. To my mind, describing today's announcement as a U-turn seems perfectly fair. Photograph: Murdo Macleod 9.50am: Here's Ed Miliband (left) on the sentencing announcement.The public were rightly appalled that the government was proposing that people who committed rape should see their sentences cut by 50% and be let out within as little as 15 months.Now the prime minister has to ask how did he get himself into the position of making a proposal which hasn't thought through.
Q: [This is from Charles West, a doctor who is one of those leading the campaign for the health bill to be dropped.] Why do you treat the amendment passed at last year's spring conference as a list of all the faults in the bill?Liz Barker says the Lib Dems have not got everything that they wanted. But they have got 95% of the changes they demanded, she says.Williams says the Lib Dems have changed the bill's whole approach to competition and put the secretary of state back in charge.She says she respects some of her Labour critics on this, but not Andy Burnham. He is attacking the Lib Dems over the commercialisation of the NHS that he actually encouraged when he was in office, she says.Q: Why aren't the Lib Dems insisting on the publication of the NHS risk register?Marks says the Lib Dems have not said the government should suppress the risk register.
It is Sullivan, writing in the Sunday Times, who offers us most un-Joanish optimism (at 48 he must be somewhat younger but has worn less well and sports a beard) about where Britain is and likes to quote Orwell to the effect that the country has changed out of all recognition but remains essentially the same. That's my hunch too, for better and for worse.Sullivan too remembers the old divisions – "the dreary dreadfulness of the 70s" of his teens, the ideological and regional divide. He puts the phone-hacking scandal in its place, it's not Watergate but more like another blundering Tory scandal – "the Profumo affair without the sex". Brits still like to cut people down to size, still read an unchanged Private Eye and endure our strangely gentle and unpredictable weather.
Balls says Labour did make some mistakes,
marc by marc jacobs tote, like the 75p tax rise for pensioners and abolishing the 10p rate of tax. Labour should have got more employers to train, it should have adopted tougher controls on immigration and it didn't regulate the banks properly.Balls says Labour did not spend every pound wisely.But he says Labour did not over-spend.? Balls refused to apologise for Labour's record on spending. "Don't let anyone tell you that Labour in government was profligate with public money - when we went into the crisis with lower national debt than we inherited in 1997.12.31pm: Balls is now describing his five-point growth plan.1. Repeat the bank bonus tax and use the money on a job creation scheme.
They kind of pretty much treat all MPs with an equal amount of contempt.11.35am: Maria Miller, the disabilities minister, has announced a wage incentive scheme to encourage employers to take on young disabled people. They will receive up to ￡2,275 if they recruit young disabled people throught the work choice programme.11.41am: The retail sales figures for April were very poor. My colleague Zoe Wood has all the details here.Here's a comment from Cathy Jamieson, a shadow Treasury minister.These are very disappointing figures which show just how much last year's VAT rise has backfired. Retail sales are not only down in the last month, but down compared to a year ago. And even stripping out petrol sales, which were pushed up at the end of March when the government needlessly created panic at the pumps, retail sales are still down.
50 traditional large(ish) beef pasty. We shall see.More significant by far is the day's other U-turn, announced at the same time with MPs on their Whit break and a bank holiday looming, Ken Clarke's retreat on "secret justice" for those involved in cases where intelligence-gathered evidence is important. Knowing his enemy as well as he does – not as sleepy as his photo from Trent in the Guardian suggests – the justice secretary makes his case in the Daily Mail which has been hounding him on this one (rightly so in this instance). Here it is, crafty fellow.Inquests (like the recent "spy in the bag" case or military deaths abroad) will now be excluded from civil cases (ex-Guantánamo detainee, Binyam Mohamed's case is one such) where intelligence data will be revealed in closed hearings; judges, not ministers will decide which cases are deemed to warrant such hearings; they will only apply in cases where exceptional national security factors, not the vague "national interest" can be invoked.
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