Party Lines: October 7th

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

In today’s “Party Lines”, Ed Miliband was interviewed by “This Morning”, and discussed public sector strikes, the shadow cabinet election and the economy. Jack Straw was firecely critical of Peter Mandelson over his memoirs, and shadow schools minister Vernon Coaker accused the government of “doing down the achievements of children”.

Ed Miliband gave a wide-ranging interview on “This Morning” today, and said, “If the Tories want to underestimate me, that’s absolutely right by me”. Ed used the interview as an opportunity to react to the threat of public sector strikes, and John Hutton’s pension reform plans, saying:

“I don’t think we should be talking about industrial action. I think it’s very premature to be talking about that, I’m going to look at John Hutton’s report because people want us to deal with this in a responsible way and I think John Hutton is a responsible person. I’m going to look at what he’s got to say.”

“I’m afraid if we try and divide the country, that somehow the public sector is some sort of drain on the public sector then I’ll think we’ll be making a big mistake. John Hutton said in his report, as I understand it, the average pension for someone in the public sector is £7,000. These are not gold plated fat cats.”

On the shadow cabinet election which comes to a close today, Miliband was clear that he wants to make use of talent from across the party – not just those who supported him in the leadership contest:

“I choose my shadow cabinet in the next couple of days, I want to use talent from across our party. Not just the people who voted for me, and that’s what I think the country would want me to do.”

And on the economy, he began to fight back against Cameron and Osborne’s attempts to paint the deficit as Labour’s legacy, saing:

“I don’t think that David Cameron is right when he says that the deficit is our fault because actually the deficit was caused by the huge banking crisis. You see it around the world. Of course we take responsibility for not regulating the banks properly, of course we should take our responsibility but what I’m trying to do, is to be as honest as possible about what I think we did right – which is quite a lot – and what I think we did wrong. I think that’s the right thing to do.”

Jack Straw was critical of Peter Mandelson’s decision to publish his diaries in an interview with BBC Radio 5 this morning – saying that the cabinet would have shown him the door had they known his plans:

“I profoundly disagree with the approach that Peter Mandelson has taken, which was to record entirely confidential, private conversations and then to stick them in his diary just a couple of months after. Because if he had ever said to us: I’m going to write this down, I’m going to publish it a couple of weeks after an election, one would have said: Thanks very much Peter, there’s the door.”

Shadow schools minister Vernon Coaker responded to the publication of Key Stage Two progress measures today, and attacked the government for “doing down the achievements of children”:

“I cannot understand why the government is trying to spin these figures by doing down the achievements of children and the hard work of their teachers.”

“The fact is that the proportion of children making the expected level of progress between seven and 11 years old has jumped two percentage points in Maths and English since last year. In maths this has jumped five percentage points in just two years. We should be celebrating this as a success, whilst still being clear that there is more to do.”

“Labour was introducing a fully-funded guarantee of one to one tuition for all children falling behind in English and maths, which was blocked by the Conservatives before the election. The targeted support we had already introduced was clearly making a difference as these figures show.”