May 2015 UK General Election Campaign.

[Admiral Yi]

Panera scones are passable.

[Sheilbh]

David Cameron made another foodie faux pas today, he messed up how Devonians & Cornish do their scones. He thought the Devonians put jam and then cream on them, while in fact in was the opposite (Cornish) method:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-32258235

After Tamar-gate I thought Cameron would know to avoid Devon-Cornwall controversies

I wish the Mail would let us know what they really think:

Red Ed's VERY tangled love life: Miliband's wife tells of fury after meeting 'unattached' Ed, only to learn he was seeing Newsnight's Stephanie - just one of a number of relationships he had with women from same clique
Justine Miliband reveals how she met future Labour leader at dinner party
But she was 'furious' when she discovered he was dating the party hostess
Mr Miliband was at the time seeing Newsnight editor Stephanie Flanders
She was just a number of women he dated from the same privileged clique
By ANDREW PIERCE FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 23:01, 9 April 2015 | UPDATED: 00:31, 10 April 2015


Ed and Justine Miliband first met at a dinner party, hosted by the woman he was 'secretly' dating

Relish the scene. A dinner party in West London. The hostess: Stephanie Flanders, the glamorous then economics editor of BBC2's Newsnight. The guests: young barristers and would-be politicians.

Central to the party that night back in March 2004 was Flanders' boyfriend, Labour rising star Ed Miliband. At the time, he was chief economics adviser to the Chancellor, Gordon Brown.

Miliband had been back in Britain for two months after a brief spell as a lecturer at Harvard University in the U.S. Ever the policy nerd, the son of a Marxist professor waxed lyrical about economic theory.

As he held court, a young woman called Justine Thornton, who was sitting across the table and whom he had never met before, became transfixed.

A clever young environmental lawyer, she had been invited by Stephanie — the brilliant daughter of Michael Flanders, of the Fifties and Sixties musical comedy duo Flanders & Swann.

Yesterday, Justine recalled in a red-top newspaper: 'I thought he was good-looking and clever and seemed to be unattached. But we just went down a conversation cul-de-sac. Apparently we had nothing in common.

'He just wanted to talk about economics — one of my least favourite subjects. None of our conversations went anywhere.'

Mrs Miliband said that she was 'furious' when — far from being 'unattached' — she found out that he was 'secretly going out with' the woman who had invited her for dinner.

Fast-forward more than 11 years and the Milibands have since had two children, married and believe they are less than a month away from moving house with their family to No 10 Downing Street.

But the story of the pair's first meeting offers a fascinating insight into the somewhat caddish character of the Labour Leader.

For, not only did he knife his elder brother in the back by ending his dream of getting the Labour leadership by standing against him (contrary to the wishes of their mother), but he met his future wife Justine (albeit unwittingly) at that dinner party hosted by his then girlfriend.

The story emerged yesterday when Mrs Miliband gave an interview to the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror. Clearly she was guided by Labour spin doctors, who wanted to give the impression to voters that her husband was a touchy-feely human being, rather than the soulless nerd that his awkward image conveys on TV. The simpering headline of the article ran: 'Ed bandaged me up after I was bitten by a Doberman . . . and I fell in love.'

Justine told how, during the 2005 election campaign, Ed had come to her rescue after she was bitten by the dog.

It happened when they were putting leaflets through letter-boxes in houses in Runcorn, Cheshire. 'Ed bandaged me and I fell in love with him,' said Justine.



Former partners of Mr Miliband include Juliet Soskice (left) and fellow political aide Liz Lloyd (right)

After their first meeting at that 2004 dinner party, it was at least a year before they started dating. Justine's recollection isn't, though, the first public airing of her love story with Ed.

In the biography of the Labour leader, titled Ed: The Milibands And The Making Of A Labour Leader, an associate is quoted as saying: 'Although she was struck by his eyes — wide and brown and fixed on their subject — a friend remembers her undoubted excitement after meeting Ed as: 'Gosh, how fascinating, he's really clever', rather than: 'Gosh, how handsome'.' Perhaps glossing over what may be seen as such caddish behaviour, the Daily Mirror omitted to say that the dinner's hostess, Stephanie Flanders (who later left the BBC for a £400,000-a-year job at a bank in the City), was Ed's then girlfriend.

It was left to Tony Blair's biographer John Rentoul to let the cat out of the bag after reading the Mirror story, when he tweeted: 'Justine on clandestine Ed. Why has Mirror not named the host of that dinner? It was Stephanie Flanders.'


Stephanie Flanders (pictured), a former girlfriend of Mr Miliband, hosted the dinner party where he first met his future wife

Considering that she, at the time, was economics editor of BBC-TV's flagship Newsnight, Rentoul added: 'Could the secrecy have been because he was a Treasury special adviser and Stephanie Flanders was a BBC economics journalist?'

What's more, there is another intriguing twist to this story of high politics and high economics.

For two years ago, Ed Miliband ungallantly blurted out, during an interview with a celebrity magazine, that not only had he romanced Stephanie but that his close Labour colleague and Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, had had a relationship with her, too.

Miliband said: 'We did both date her but there was a long time apart between me and Ed. Stephanie and I don't have any problems running into each other now.'

For her part, Stephanie had no forewarning of Miliband's revelation and restricted her response to curtly dismissing her relationship with him as having been 'very brief and a very long time ago'.

However, her relationship with Balls, a decade earlier, was more serious. They met in 1989 at Harvard University, where they were both Kennedy scholars after having graduated from Oxford University.

It was while they were working at the Financial Times as leader writers that their friendship blossomed into a serious relationship.

The way these relationships intertwined also highlights the deeply incestuous and narrow world of the Labour high command. For it wasn't just Miliband and Balls, but others, too, who had close personal relationships.

Of course, Balls is now married to fellow Shadow Cabinet Minister Yvette Cooper. All four studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Oxford University.
Cooper and Flanders were tutorial partners and Kennedy scholars at Harvard. Miliband also studied at Harvard.

Cooper once shared a house with Miliband (who apparently had a few other girlfriends). And she met Balls when they both worked at the FT.

But back to Ed Miliband's tangled love-life. For several years in the mid-1990s, when he was working as an adviser to the then-Shadow Chancellor Gordon Brown, he went out with fellow political aide, Liz Lloyd (a Cambridge graduate).

She worked for a time for Tony Blair, who described her in his memoirs as 'an English rose, intellectually able and blue stocking or red stocking according to the occasion'.

In the summer of 1995, she and Miliband went on holiday to the south of France. They stayed in the family home of one of Miliband's first girlfriends, Juliet Soskice (the daughter of an LSE political economist and who went on to marry the late tycoon Andrew Rosenfeld, who gave £1 million to the Labour Party).

At the time, Juliet was dating the Blairite journalist Phil Collins (who went on to write speeches for Blair). It was clearly a busman's holiday, as much of the discussion among the group was about the national minimum wage which was a New Labour policy.


After breaking up with Liz Lloyd, Mr Miliband had a brief relationship with the journalist Alice Miles (pictured)

'We discussed it like we were in a Fabian Society seminar,' recalled Collins. 'I remember being in the kitchen and listening to Ed having a conversation about it in real detail.'

Miliband's relationship with Lloyd continued when Blair became PM. Her job at No 10 meant she sat next to her lover's elder brother David Miliband, who was a key figure in the Downing Street policy unit.

After breaking up with Lloyd, Ed Miliband had a brief relationship with the journalist Alice Miles, who then worked for The Times. Ms Miles, who some years later became a single parent, also had a fling with her then coke-snorting Times colleague Tom Baldwin, who is now Miliband's chief spin doctor.

What a deliciously small and privileged world! One that is a million miles from the lives of millions of ordinary voters.

And so back to Red Ed and Justine.

The next time they met after his questionable behaviour at his then girlfriend Stephanie Flanders' dinner party was in the months leading up to him becoming an MP. Later, she helped campaign for him in Doncaster during the 2005 election by moving chairs around for a public meeting.

Some months after, Justine planned a holiday with a woman barrister friend, Quincy Whitaker, to Libya to see the Roman ruins. However, after it was booked, Justine said she wanted to go, instead, with Ed Miliband.

Their relationship had consolidated further by the time Miliband was appointed Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the Brown government. Not only had their personal lives meshed, but their professional ones, too, as Justine (who was a member of the Labour Party) had written a book on the environment.

A few years later they had the first of their two children — and then decided to get married (in May 2011).

This week, by happily putting the spotlight on her husband's past love affairs, Justine must be hoping that the result will be to portray him as a dashing romantic figure.

However, many voters — particularly women — may see him in a less attractive light.

[Sheilbh]

Also this week in George Galloway loathsomeness. First he threatens a local business:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/somethings-brewing-in-bradford
Then this about his extra-curricular activities:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/09/george-galloway-says-his-labour-opponent-tried-to-join-his-party?CMP=share_btn_tw
And finally this, which must be a new low even for him:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/09/george-galloway-naz-shah-forced-marriage-nikah-bradford-hustings

[Richard Hakluyt]

He's a bounder, but he does know how to eat a pie 

[Sheilbh]

A Tory MP quoted as saying 'we're not in the panic room yet. We're in the waiting room to the panic room.'

Meanwhile the Tories, needing to broaden their appeal, are today mainly focusing on raising the inheritance tax threshold to a million

[Agelastus]

A Tory MP quoted as saying 'we're not in the panic room yet. We're in the waiting room to the panic room.'

Meanwhile the Tories, needing to broaden their appeal, are today mainly focusing on raising the inheritance tax threshold to a million

I think I'm at the "shrug" stage now...after all, in the last few days we've had the Lib Dems saying that they'll loan 18-30 year olds up to £2000, repayable over 2 years, for a deposit for renting a flat so that they can "move out of home" (if an 18-30 year old can't save up enough for a deposit of that level what makes the Lib Dems' think that they'll be able to repay such a loan?)

And Labour saying that they'll provide "one to one" Midwife care from Labour to birth; the first reaction I had was where are these midwives coming from? The first reaction of a family member was "so, they're not going to be allowed a toilet break then?"

And the Tories coming up with "we'll give the NHS an extra £8 billion" in a way that lets Labour attack them for "unfunded pledges"!

God, this Election Campaign has already dragged on to long.

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Not that raising the Inheritance Tax threshold isn't such a bad idea - disregarding than the fact that I think it should be abolished it was allowed to sit at a level that that wasn't adjusted for inflation for far too many years. Doing it as an election pledge rather than a budget measure, however...

[Richard Hakluyt]

I may be misunderstanding Labour's plans but I'm concerned at their apparent intention to fine "tax avoiders" :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32271846

Will that duty free bottle of sambuca I imported back in 2011 come back to haunt me? What about all the petrol duty I avoid by not driving?

Crivvens!

[Sheilbh]

In fairness the examples in that article do sound quite sensible.

But anyone who believes that Labour's going to make £7.5 billion by clamping down on tax evasion shouldn't be allowed to vote. Same goes for anyone who believes crap about billions of pounds of 'efficiencies' that can be found.

I think I'm at the "shrug" stage now...after all, in the last few days we've had the Lib Dems saying that they'll loan 18-30 year olds up to £2000, repayable over 2 years, for a deposit for renting a flat so that they can "move out of home" (if an 18-30 year old can't save up enough for a deposit of that level what makes the Lib Dems' think that they'll be able to repay such a loan?)

I think that's a decent idea. In fairness I've had situations where the landlord has decided to kick us out to renovate the place or announced that the rent would be increasing by 50% if we extend the tenancy. So before I get my old deposit back I've got to get together £1200 for the next place. Normally I've had to borrow the money from my mum and dad. I'd probably be okay now with overdrafts etc but it can be a problem.

And Labour saying that they'll provide "one to one" Midwife care from Labour to birth; the first reaction I had was where are these midwives coming from? The first reaction of a family member was "so, they're not going to be allowed a toilet break then?"

To be honest I always thought this was the norm. This may be because my experience of women being pregnant has been in the countryside where maybe it is normal.

[Sheilbh]

Ok. I quite like the Greens Election Broadcast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPgS7p40ERg#t=146

Of course nothing will beat UKIP's outstanding work from 2005:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgfQwhKkVR8

[Agelastus]

I think that's a decent idea. In fairness I've had situations where the landlord has decided to kick us out to renovate the place or announced that the rent would be increasing by 50% if we extend the tenancy. So before I get my old deposit back I've got to get together £1200 for the next place. Normally I've had to borrow the money from my mum and dad. I'd probably be okay now with overdrafts etc but it can be a problem.

But you wouldn't be eligible for the loan anyway, Sheilbh - not in the situation described. This is supposed to be available for people leaving the parental home for the first time, not moving between rental flats.

I would imagine that for the majority of people over 18 that living at home is going to be cheaper than renting a place of your own - so if you can't manage your finances well enough to build up the deposit in that situation how are you going to manage your finances well enough to be able to pay it off?

And why should we be bribing people to leave home anyway? Haven't we got a housing/accommodation shortage?

[Josquius]

The British obsession with home ownership bemuses me.

at they'll provide "one to one" Midwife care from Labour to birth; the first reaction I had was where are these midwives coming from? The first reaction of a family member was "so, they're not going to be allowed a toilet break then?"

Midwifery is quite in vogue as something a lot of girls want to get into but it is pretty difficult to get onto a course. Places are rather limited.
I guess they'll put more money into training.
Still won't happen overnight but seems a reasonable promise.

[Richard Hakluyt]

For my generation of parents most of the grumbles I heard about inadequate maternity care came from people who used the London hospitals, for the people in the provinces it was one-to-one (or appeared to be, you don't actually want a midwife constantly hovering over you after all).

Birth rate has gone up quite a lot since and there has been a failure to train sufficient midwives. But I can hardly be bothered to type this as, for my entire life, British governments have always ignored the demographic data till the crunch happens. It is going to happen with primary school provision very soon and secondary (naturally enough) about six years later, maenwhile the policy appears to be to train inadequate numbers of teachers and piss off those who are currently in the profession 

[Sheilbh]

But you wouldn't be eligible for the loan anyway, Sheilbh - not in the situation described. This is supposed to be available for people leaving the parental home for the first time, not moving between rental flats.

True. But I would have been eligible for my first flat when I'd graduated which I had to borrow the deposit for - I think both of my flatmates at the time were also borrowing money from their parents for it.

I'd decided there were minimal jobs, especially for someone who can't drive, in rural Dorset so I'd be better off in London. Worked out in the end but I needed help to get out.

Not that raising the Inheritance Tax threshold isn't such a bad idea - disregarding than the fact that I think it should be abolished it was allowed to sit at a level that that wasn't adjusted for inflation for far too many years. Doing it as an election pledge rather than a budget measure, however...

I disagree in general, I'd be pretty supportive of a prohibitive rate of Inheritance Tax - certainly above certain thresholds. And I don't think £325k (£650k for married couples) is too low or desperately needs to be raised to £1 million/£2 million.

I think the Tories remembered the effect it had in 2007 and thought they'd try it again. Trouble is then they were talking about 'sharing the proceeds of growth'. Now they've spent five years cutting spending and, along with cutting the top rate of tax, it just shows an odd sense of priorities. And I can't think who this is likely to tempt to vote Tory who wasn't already going to vote Tory.

Edit: Meanwhile, again, I'm envious of Scotland's leaders. Holyrood 2016 looks a far better contest:

Sturgeon vs Murphy vs Davidson is the best show in British politics
82 comments 9 April 2015 18:09Alex Massie 

Right now, you know, Nicola Sturgeon vs Jim Murphy vs Ruth Davidson is the best show in British politics. It really is. Better, for sure, than David Cameron vs Ed Miliband vs Nick Clegg.

The three Scottish leaders are each substantial – and likeable – figures in their own right but it also helps that the question of Scotland is a large and important issue upon which there is mighty disagreement. That makes for a heftier, more passionate, kind of politics. The future matters and is, depending upon our choices, very different. It is more than just a managerial process.

This week's two Scottish debates confirmed all this. They were, as Fraser says, proper politics. There is a thirst for argument up here and a welcome for the rough-and-tumble too. The future of the country really is at stake and so too, for that matter, the kind of country we wish to be.

All three leaders have reason to be happy with their work this week. Ruth Davidson's blue-collar Conservatism is the party's best look (it is hard to imagine Ruth instinctively pandering to non-doms, for instance) and she gave a fine account of herself this week. I thought she "won" Tuesday's debate.

Jim Murphy also had a good week. He was, on balance, the most impressive performer last night. Sure, his manner and persona annoys some people and he occasionally has the look of a manic pterodactyl but, at this stage of Operation Salvage Something, everything and anything is fair game for Labour. This is no time to be worried about delicacies; it is time to get stuck in. That necessarily means making some outlandish claims but Labour desperately need what the SNP once spent years craving: attention and relevance. Murphy achieved something on both fronts this week.

As for Nicola Sturgeon, well, the only way was down following her triumphant appearance at the UK leaders' debate in Manchester. That was a turkey shoot; this week she was the hunted, not the hunter. Even so and even though I don't think she "won" either contest it's not as though she was badly beaten either. She retains first mover advantage. She is still the alternative to a "Westminster system" with which many voters are thoroughly scunnered.

Nevertheless, Labour have reason to be grateful this morning that Ms Sturgeon pledged last night that her MPs would press for "full fiscal autonomy" in the next parliament. At last, you see, Labour have an issue they believe can cut through with voters. An issue that means more than flags and identity and everything else.

In one sense Sturgeon's remarks were hardly a surprising revelation. Full fiscal autonomy is, after all, the SNP's preferred policy. 'Politician confirms policy' is not a shocking development.

And yet FFA is also a ticklish problem for the SNP. It shifts the Scottish debate away from identity and aspiration to cold, hard, economics. It moves the argument, therefore, from an area of SNP strength to an area of relative weakness. It was, more than anything else, doubts about numbers and, consequently, fear of 'uncertainty' that dashed Yes hopes last September.

It is true that, as the SNP suggests, moving to FFA would take some years (though how, in that case, they thought the UK could be unraveled in a mere 18 months is, well, something else). But it's also true that it hands Labour their best opportunity yet.

Not because Scotland is too poor to manage its affairs or because FFA is self-evidently daft but because, in the short-to-medium term, FFA must at some point require considerable tax increases, large spending cuts or, most probably, some combination of the two.

At present, you see and as the Institute of Fiscal Studies has helpfully clarified, Scotland receives around £7.6bn a year more in UK spending than she contributes in UK revenue. She is, as the SNP always argue, a larger than average contributor but also, as they generally neglect to point out, a larger than average recipient of UK spending. (London is also in this situation though London contributes more per capita than she receives.)

No matter how you slice and dice this and no matter what kind of timetable you put on it this is a gap that is more than just technical. (A reminder for slow learners: £1200 is a larger number than £400.) It would have to be closed at some point.

Now you can argue that lower public spending in Scotland would be no bad thing. I have no ideological objection to that. But this is not, it must be said, a popular position in the present political climate. Nor is there any great Caledonian thirst for higher taxes.

Perhaps this would change though, frankly, I doubt it. Independence within the UK – which is more or less what FFA amounts to – comes with certain disagreeable costs. About seven billion of them, at the moment. (Recovering oil prices would help offset this difficulty but they can only take you so far.)

So this is why Labour are in a moderately chipper humour today. They believe the SNP have committed themselves to £7bn of spending cuts or tax increases or both. That's a number we will now hear every day from every Scottish Labour politician. Never mind Tory austerity; think about SNP austerity.

That's a message they think will cut through on the fabled doorsteps of ordinary working families all across Scotland. And perhaps it will. It's certainly the best piece of news Labour have had in a long, long time.

And while it remains the case that Labour are the underpuppy in this fight even a modest advance in the polls might produce a significant improvement in their final result. 35 percent of the vote gives Labour an even-money chance of being the largest Scottish party after the election. (True, this would still be a disastrous result but, hey, it's better than annihilation.)

Labour believes FFA is one of those notions that polls better in the abstract than it does when the detail is explained to voters. It is true that surveys routinely report Scots want control of taxation and welfare; it is also true that those same surveys generally report that Scots want taxation and welfare to be uniform across the United Kingdom.

In which circumstances, it may be that the only thing worse than frustrating the aspirations of the Scottish people is giving them what they want.

Then again, the only people who can give the SNP what they say they want – full fiscal autonomy – are the Conservatives and the SNP say they would never do any kind of deal with the Tories. Even if the Tories were to offer the SNP what they say they want. (They might not make any such offer. That's not the point.) And as you savour that, remember that the nationalists will do a deal – albeit an unofficial, on the QT, kind of arrangement – with the party that will offer them nothing.

The game is complex and sometimes it makes no sense but, my, it's a braw game nonetheless. All this skirmishing, mind you, is still only the first part of the first-half. The final whistle won't sound until May 2016 after next year's Scottish parliamentary elections...

[Iormlund]

But you wouldn't be eligible for the loan anyway, Sheilbh - not in the situation described. This is supposed to be available for people leaving the parental home for the first time, not moving between rental flats.

True. But I would have been eligible for my first flat when I'd graduated which I had to borrow the deposit for - I think both of my flatmates at the time were also borrowing money from their parents for it.

I'd decided there were minimal jobs, especially for someone who can't drive, in rural Dorset so I'd be better off in London. Worked out in the end but I needed help to get out.

That's pretty common here. Especially since part-time work is rare, youth unemployment very high and housing prices obscene. I loaned my bro money when he got his first job, in Madrid. There was no chance for him to afford it otherwise since, as most first jobs, it was an unpaid internship (I did mine while still living at home, like most of my friends).

[grumbler]

Is the stab in the back attack on Ed Miliband anti-Semitic?
Michael Fallon's broadside at Ed Miliband yesterday has sparked accusations of anti-Semitism. But the reality is more mundane - and better news for Labour, too
BY STEPHEN BUSH PUBLISHED 10 APRIL, 2015 - 08:00

A weak, ruthless, surrender-minded, sex god? Photo:Getty


Michael Fallon's attack on Ed Miliband yesterday has raised eyebrows  - the Labour leader, we are told is too weak to keep Trident while also being a fiendish backstabber who betrayed his own brother.

It's that latter accusation that has got the Defence Secretary in hot water, with some commentators suggesting it echoes the "stab in the back" myth that was popular in far-right circles in inter-war Germany. Various internal enemies - Communists, Jews, and the politicians of the Weimar Republic -were held to have secretly undermined the German war effort in the First World War to further their own ends.

But was it a deliberate slur? Frankly, as dog whistles go, it seems unlikely that anyone in CCHQ thinks there's any mileage in targeting the historically well-informed and anti-Semitic voting bloc. It's somewhat grating, too, to see people who were willing to share a platform with Ken Livingstone in 2012 suddenly developing bat-like hearing as far as  anti-Semitic code words as concerned.   Certainly there is a cross-party problem with the lazy evocation of North London in British politics, although that's as much an attack on Emily Thornberry and Tony Blair as it is on Miliband.

I am confused.  How could anyone think "back stabber" is anti-Semitic?  I mean, I suppose that some Germans have used the term, but so have a lot of Jews.  Are all of those Jews anti-Semitic too?