Labour's Posh Boys (and Girls)

By Mark Wallace
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Back row: David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Harriet Harman.

Standing in middle: Hillary Benn, Chuka Umunna.

Front row: Fiona McTaggart, Tristram Hunt, Tessa Jowell.

It's become a regular refrain from Labour ranks that the Tories are posh. The infamous Bullingdon photo, which Carla Millar today mimics above, is used as shorthand to pick at the number of privately schooled men and women in the Cabinet and in the Parliamentary Conservative Party.

The failed attempt by Labour to make class an issue in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, with activists dressed up in top hats and tails, stands out as an example of their enthusiasm for the subject.

Andrew Gimson: The fighting speech Miliband should have made when Cameron denounced McCluskey

By Andrew Gimson
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Ed Miliband’s attitude to the trade unions is hopelessly confused. He has not defined himself, and proved to Middle England how sound he is, by picking a fight with them in the manner of a latter-day Tony Blair. The present Labour leader owes too much to the unions for such a pose to carry conviction.

But Mr Miliband also shrinks from showing pride in Labour’s links with the unions. He treats them as if they are embarrassing relations from an earlier generation. He knows he owes them a lot, but takes care not be seen very often with them in public, and hates it when unkind people point out that he still relies on them for financial support.

In his recent speech on union funding, Mr Miliband attempted to finesse these difficulties. His plan is to distance himself from the unions, while becoming closer to union members: “Men and women in trade unions should be able to make a more active, individual choice on whether they become part of our party.”

According to Mr Miliband, this “could grow our membership from 200,000 to a far higher number”. It is a pleasant dream, but unless it actually happens it will remain no more than a dream. As so often, by trying to find a subtle way through a problem, Mr Miliband has ended up sounding weak, indecisive and desperate to be all things to all men.

To Tory eyes, this is curious. The country is no longer wracked by strikes. The unions have lost their legal immunities, and are no longer strong enough to bring the country to a halt. In 1979 they had 13 million members and now they have 6.5 million.

Small wonder Labour are enthusiastic tax-avoiders - the party is in dire financial straits

By Mark Wallace
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Today's Times contains an awkward revelation for Ed Miliband - despite turning a surplus last year, Labour managed to organise its tax affairs so efficiently that the party paid no corporation tax whatsoever.

Of course, there's no suggestion they did anything illegal, but given Miliband's regular drum-beating about the immorality of tax avoidance it is more than ironic to see his party's accountants engaged in such nifty footwork. Had they paid tax on the headline surplus, their bill would have been over half a million pounds.

But it's small wonder they are looking after the pennies so carefully all of a sudden.

The battle with Unite, and Miliband's proposed reforms to the union relationship, are set to reduce their income by several million quid a year; the Evening Standard reports that the party still owes £7 million dating back to the "loans for lordships" scandal in 2006; and there is a growing row about the millions of pounds worth of extraordinarily cheap credit Labour obtained from the crisis-stricken Co-Op Bank.

The party's money problems are so bad that not even Ed Miliband's enthusiastic tax efficiency can dent them. It would be embarrassing if Labour were to go bust - but at least it would be a reminder of how little they can be trusted with money.

Labour's job advert for a new spinner reveals the holes in their operation

By Mark Wallace
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Guido reported a few days ago that Labour are seeking to hire a lobby journalist to become their new Deputy Director of Communications.

Now the job advert has gone online, and it reveals a few things about how Labour view the state of their operation at the moment:

Among the responsibilities are:

• "Sharpen and improve placement of attack stories..."

• "Ensure message discipline from the Shadow Cabinet and front bench teams..."

• "Improve language from the Shadow Cabinet and front bench teams..."

In other words, the Opposition isn't landing punches, Miliband is sick of frontbenchers rocking his boat and Labour doesn't feel its Shadow Cabinet are communicating properly - and they know it.

Len McCluskey answers ConHome's question - his power over Labour will continue

By Mark Wallace
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Last week, writing up Ed Miliband's speech on Labour's trade union scandal, I raised a number of practical questions about how the reforms will work. Len McCluskey's interview in today's Guardian helpfully answers the first of them

I asked:

"Len McCluskey told the BBC Miliband is not calling for an opt-in to the union Political Funds generally. Does this mean unions could just split their Affiliation and Political Funds, allowing them to carry on automatically opting members in to finance hard left campaigns? Will Miliband pledge not to accept lump sum donations from such Political Funds?"

A week after Miliband's pledge to reduce union influence, the GMB boast of their Parliamentary power

By Mark Wallace
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Despite its practical flaws, Ed Miliband's speech on Labour's union links appears to have put off his party's crisis on the subject for now. The obscure nature of the proposals, combined with a clever attempt to bounce the issue back onto the Conservatives, mean that the scandal has simmered down.

But it hasn't gone away. While he carefully avoided committing himself to a timetable, at some point the press will expect to see results - and the unions are going to start squealing if he does take meaningful action to prevent their takeover attempts.

A measure of the unions' commitment to their campaign comes in the summer edition of the GMB's in-house magazine (which bizarrely appears to have stolen its logo design from Heat and Nuts). The London edition is called Candid - and it lives up to the name.

Strong Miliband, taking on the unions? Or Weak Miliband, incapable of doing so? Which will it be?

By Paul Goodman
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Ed Miliband's speech yesterday was a triumph for him.  The unions will resist his plan to decouple Labour Party membership from trade union membership.  Miliband will insist on it; ballot his Party and win; decouple Labour from the unions altogether (throwing them out of the electoral college that elects the Party's leader in the process) impress voters as a strong leader - and transform their view of him and his Party.  New members will flock to join Labour, the plan to widen participation in the selection of Labour's London Mayoral candidate will be a success, and the media spotlight will swing onto the Conservatives over their own funding and MPs' "second jobs".  Labour's lead in the polls will thus be cemented, and Miliband will go on to be Prime Minister after 2015.

Ed Miliband's speech yesterday was a disaster for him.  Whether or not the unions resist his plan to decouple Labour Party membership from trade union membership, their political funds will be untouched - which is what matters - and the unions will cling to their place in the electoral college.  Having sprung his cobbled-together plan on his Party because of Tory pressure, Miliband will see it slowly unravel - confirming voters' present view of him.  If he succeeds in the decoupling, Labour will lose masses of members and millions of pounds.  At any rate, nothing will have have happened to make future Falkirks less likely, and Unite and other unions will seize control of the selection of London's Mayoral candidate.  Labour's poll lead collapses and Cameron will be Prime Minister again after 2015.

WATCH: Labour grandee Lord Whitty rejected a role in Miliband's "unworkable" trade union reforms

By Mark Wallace
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It seems we aren't the only people concerned about the viability of Ed Miliband's trade union proposals.

The above video shows BBC News reporting that Lord Whitty, a former General Secretary of the Labour Party, rejected an invitation from Ed Miliband to oversee the implementation of the proposals on the grounds that they were "unworkable" and "the groundwork had not been done".

This explains the disparity between reports last night of Whitty's involvement and Miliband's announcement today that the job had in fact gone to former Unite official Ray Collins. Evidently Collins was the second choice - because Lord Whitty saw through the plans as soon as they were presented to him. Awkward.

New leaked documents show the scale of Miliband's union problem - but how might he solve it?

By Mark Wallace
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This Wordle shows the 50 most common words in the Sunday media summary prepared for Ed Miliband by Labour's press office, which was leaked to me yesterday. In effect, this is the news that landed on his breakfast table. As you can see, it did not make for happy reading.

The document allows us to see the world through Miliband's eyes. This is the information prioritised and summarised for his attention by his own media team, and therefore gives us a hint of the worldview which informs his thinking.

Out of thirteen pages, a full seven - the outright majority - are given over to coverage of the Falkirk/Unite scandal.

5,175 words are allotted to his party's internal problems, more than ten times the number used to cover the twin Middle Eastern crises in Syria and Egypt.

By my count only one word in the top 50 - "schools" - is not related to Labour's woes, and that is in there due to high profile coverage of Michael Gove's reforms.

The seriousness of the issue for Labour collectively and Miliband personally (the large "EM" in the graphic shows how regularly he features) is clear. The question is what can he possible do to make the crisis stop?

Miliband will want you to think that he’s broken from the unions – and Ken Livingstone to think that he hasn’t

By Peter Hoskin
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Yes, you did read that right. “Ed Miliband to explore historic break with trade unions.” That’s really what the Guardian headline says.

But, below that headline, the truth of the story is a little murkier. Apparently, “Miliband has made no decisions on whether to break Labour’s links with the trade unions.” And the idea that he should seems to have emerged from the shadows rather than from the Labour leader’s office. One “former Cabinet minister” tells the paper that “we need to have a commission that looks at the union link”.

And it gets murkier still when you consider a tweet that LBC Radio published earlier this morning. Turns out that, with the fires raging around him, Miliband took time to call Ken Livingstone – yes, Ken Livingstone – yesterday: