Amid the controversy surrounding the government’s benefit cuts that are serving as small print for discussion following the Budget, the long-drawn-out Labour leadership contest continues to run, the other, less-noticed story in British politics today. So, time for a quick update on the three main players:
** David Miliband has launched a campaign against the increase in VAT from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent, which the Lib Dems themselves had opposed and which even the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has labelled “regressive”. He is writing to each Lib Dem MP setting out why they should vote against the move in the Budget. Miliband has also criticised the record on schooling of successive governments — including Labour administrations — and called for the removal of the “obstacle course” of constant exams for students from the age of 14 onward.
** In Westminster, Ed Balls is considered to have done his campaign no harm with his feisty performance on BBC1’s Question Time last week, during which he tore into the “stooge” Vince Cable over the Budget and over the reversal of critical Lib Dem policy lines — including the position on VAT — that had provided cover for the party. Yesterday, Balls made the running on Iain Duncan Smith’s plans for reallocating the jobless, likening it to Norman Tebbit’s call for the unemployed to get “on your bike”.
** And Ed Miliband sets out his case for “values” over “management” in politics in a ten-minute interview for the BBC’s Daily Politics. In it, he says that he is a politician of the “centre ground” but that he is in politics to “shape that centre ground from the left”. Miliband notes that it wasn’t just people “on the left” who were outraged at the banking crisis, for example, and claims that he could reach out beyond Labour’s core vote. Incidentally, he admits to having a “geekish” background, but defends his career, which has been largely in politics. He also confirms that he and his brother, David, told each other that it would be “quite wrong” to stand in one another’s way when both men decided to stand for the leadership.
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