Ed’s inbox – April 21st

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

If Ed Miliband could only read five blogposts each day, he’d read these ones…

Labour needs to stop being the bossing and interfering party – Labour Uncut
By Peter Watt

Last week’s decision to end the so called bin-taxes was clever politics by the government. And as there hasn’t been an awful lot of clever politics recently by the government, I thought that it was significant. What was particularly clever was that the weekend “announcement” was actually an announcement that the ending of bin taxes would be announced in about a month’s time.

But the government knows that the local elections and AV referendum (whatever the result) are going to be pretty challenging for them. They know that there is not a lot that they can do to alter that. So they have decided to keep reminding people of what they think the public see as Labour weakness. So they might lose the battle in the next month, but they will keep sowing the seeds of an election victory in 2015. These reminders obviously include playing the blame game on the deficit and attacking Labour’s economic competence. But it also involves something else. Something more personally emotional for many voters. A perceived tendency by the last Labour government to overly interfere in people’s lives. – Read more.

How Libdems have bled voters – by newspaper – Liberal Conspiracy
By Sunny Hundal

“The collapse in Lib Dem support is the most dramatic feature of the party landscape since last year’s election,” writes YouGov’s Peter Kellner in the latest edition of Prospect magazine.

YouGov’s most recent nationwide survey, involving nearly 50,000 people, shows that as many as 69 per cent of Lib Dem voters have deserted the party since last May. But so have 24 per cent of Tories and 16 per cent of Labour voters. Labour is the only one of the three main parties whose recruits outweigh its deserters.

Of the Lib Dem deserters, 2m would now vote Labour, and 1.3m now don’t know-although bear in mind that most of the 2m who have switched to Labour are Labour identifiers (people who “generally” think of themselves as Labour) returning home since the last election. – Read more.

Thinking anew – Progress
By Robert Philpot

A year ago, a chance encounter between Gordon Brown and a Rochdale pensioner provided the iconic moment of the 2010 general election campaign and delivered the death knell to Labour’s already hyper-slim chances of winning a fourth term.

Gillian Duffy, a Labour voter all her life who had worked for the Cooperative Society in Rochdale, was by no stretch of the imagination a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. She had, as she told the former prime minister, concerns about tax, the national debt, and immigration from eastern Europe. There was no racist or xenophobic slang used to voice her concerns, which she expressed in language far milder than many will have encountered on the doorstep. – Read more.

Shock as Liberal Democrat leaflet endorses Liberal Democrat candidate – Political Scrapbook
By Political Scrapbook

News reaches Scrapbook that The Citizen, “South Edinburgh’s Community Newsletter since 1971″, will be endorsing Mike Pringle for the Edinburgh South seat in the Scottish Parliament. Borrowing from The Guardian’s “the liberal moment has come” endorsement of Nick Clegg in 2010, residents are told: – Read more.

Blue Labour founder: “Labour should involve EDL supporters” – Liberal Conspiracy
By Don Paskini

Shorter Lord Maurice Glasman, founder of “Blue Labour”:

1. Labour lied about immigration and should recognise that is not the case that everyone who comes to Britain should have equal status with people who were born here. Labour needs to involve people who support the English Defence League within the party as a way of reconnecting with working-class people.

2. In order to do this, Labour should adopt the community organising approach which led London Citizens to mobilise people to call for several hundred thousand illegal immigrants to be given British citizenship.

3. “Blue Labour’s” plan for persuading the Labour Party to adopt a grassroots-led approach and reconnect with working-class people will be via its founder becoming a member of the Leader’s inner circle and a member of the House of Lords, and through contributing to pamphlets published by the Blairite “Progress” pressure group.

If this sounds confused and incoherent – it is. Actually, I think it is nastier than that. – Read more.

Our suggestions for Ed’s inbox are limited by what we read – so if you’ve seen a blogpost that should be in Ed’s inbox, let us know.