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| Cameron and Clegg visit Essex for coalition fightback: Politics live blog | Cameron and Clegg visit Essex for coalition fightback: Politics live blog |
| (40 minutes later) | |
| 10.17am: More questions. | |
| Q: What will you do to reintegrate education? | |
| Miliband says Michael Gove is the most centralises secretary of state ever. He had an example in his constituency. If people have a problem with an academy, they have to take it up with central government. | |
| He believes Gove stands for "education for the few not the many". Free schools involve "robbing Peter to pay Paul". The English baccalaureate will discriminate against important subjects. The creative industries are hugely important. Yet art and design does not count as an English baccalaureate subject. | |
| He also says he would like to give more power to schools. | |
| Q: What will you do about the NHS? Staff feel very devalued. | |
| Miliband says he would repeal the parts of the health bill introducing free market competition. | |
| Under Labour things would have been tough. But the government has made it worse by carrying out a reorganisation at the same time. | |
| Labour did too many reorganisations when it was in government, he says. | |
| The government's plans will fragment the NHS. He is making a speech to the Royal College of Nursing next week. | |
| He ends by thanking the questioner, a nurse. People do not thank nurses enough, he says. He invites the audience to give a round of applause. | |
| Q: Do you have any specific job creation schemes? And Why is Remploy being dismantle? | |
| Miliband says he does have specific job creation schemes. Wasting the lives of young people is ridiculous, he says. Labour would tax bankers' bonuses and use that money to provide jobs for young people. As prime minister, he would be telling every private sector in the organisation from day one to mobilise behind that plan. Young people are not shirkers, he says. | |
| On Remploy, he says he does not like the changes the government is making. It did not run a proper consultation. People are being made redundant when it will be tough for them to find work. | |
| 10.17am: Miliband is good at these Q&As. When people ask a question, he makes a point of using their names and asking questions about their own experiences. | |
| 10.11am: Miliband is taking questions now. | |
| Q: Is Labour in favour of a new investment bank? | |
| Miliband says the government has spent too much time standing up for the banks and not enough standing up for small businesses. | |
| There should be a new investment bank, part private and part public, he says. This works in Germany and it works in the US. | |
| Banks have a duty to realise they have to serve the economy. Q: What would you do about housing? [This comes from someone who says his daughter has been on a council waiting list for 20 years.] | |
| Miliband says he is sorry to hear about the questioner's daughter's experience. He says it "hurts" if she has always worked and always done the right thing. | |
| The previous Conservative council in Harlow said it was going to freeze council house building. He says the new Labour council will look at whether it can do anything more. | |
| The last Labour government did not do enough on housing, he says. With housing, every party of the jigsaw needs to join up: private housing, social housing and the planning system. | |
| The government has spent two years messing up the planning system. And it has taken away targets for local authority house building. | |
| 10.06am: Ed Miliband is speaking now. | |
| He says he wants to understand why so many people did not vote in the local elections. In Harlow, only 28.4% of people vote. He passionately believes politics can make a difference to their lives, he says. | |
| He says Labour measures would make a difference. A Labour Queen's Speech would include measures to get people back into work. | |
| 10.03am: 10.03am: Ed Miliband is about to start his Q&A in Essex. | |
| The Financial Times journalist Kiran Stacey is in the audience. He has posted this on Twitter. | |
| In harlow for towie part one. Miliband's entry music is downbeat country and blues. Theme is 'tough times' if you hadn't guessed. | |
| — kiranstacey (@kiranstacey) May 8, 2012 | |
| 9.54am: You can read all today's Guardian politics stories here. And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today's paper, are here. | |
| As for the rest of the papers, here are some stories and articles that are particularly interesting. • Roland Watson in the Times (paywall) says some senior Liberal Democrats think their party will have to leave the coalition before the election to avoid being wiped out. | |
| Senior Liberal Democrats believe that the party may have to withdraw from government early to avoid being wiped out at the next general election, The Times has learnt. | |
| They think the party will need to reassert its independence from its Conservative governing partners well before polling day in May 2015. The concerns emerged during an investigation by The Times into relations within the coalition before its second anniversary this week. Other findings include: | |
| • David Cameron refused a request from Baroness Warsi, the Tory co-chairman, to attack Nick Clegg during this month's local election campaign; | |
| • George Osborne blamed Mr Clegg for the leaking of Budget secrets during an angry telephone confrontation; | |
| • Mr Clegg feared a revolt by Liberal Democrat MPs over the cut in the 50p top rate of tax, but over-ruled his closest advisers to agree it. | |
| • Vince Cable in the Daily Telegraph says other countries in the EU are supporting Britain's attempt to curb regulation. | |
| I recently attended a remarkable meeting of European economic ministers in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. We represented 15 of the 27 European Union countries: the Like Minded Group, committed to rolling back excessive regulation emanating from Brussels and to expanding the Single Market. | |
| There were governments of centre Right and centre Left, some strongly in favour of close European integration, like the Netherlands and Germany, others more sceptical, like Britain or Denmark. Yet there was a common purpose: to close down the red tape factories of Brussels. One of the biggest and most wasteful is the Working Time Directive (WTD), which sets a 48-hour limit to the working week. | |
| Like a lot of European social legislation this directive, first put forward 20 years ago, was well-intentioned. It was introduced to protect the health and safety of workers. For example, when European markets first opened up there was a legitimate need to prevent long-distance lorry drivers falling asleep at the wheel. It is also easy to forget that a few decades ago it was relatively rare for British workers to have decent holiday time and rest breaks. | |
| But a heavy-handed, one-size–fits-all approach has been adopted, with unintended perverse outcomes. The directive incorporates the idea that is most clearly expressed in the French 35-hour week: that work should be compulsorily restricted and shared out, whether or not it suits the needs of individual workers or firms. Not only is this dreadful economics, it is also deeply illiberal. | |
| • Daniel Martin in the Daily Mail says 78 charities have signed a letter to David Cameron saying he should make reform of social care his personal mission. • Iain McNicol, Labour's general secretary, tells the Independent in an interview that the idea that Labour relies entirely on large union donations is a myth. Here's what he said: | |
| We bring in as much money from our members and supporters as we bring in from trade union affiliation fees. Nearly £8m comes from our supporters in the form of their membership fees and low level donations. If we look across at the model Obama built in America, there is a huge opportunity to build on those £5, £10 and £20 donations. That's where I'll be focusing a lot of our resources. | |
| • Rachel Sylvester in the Times (paywall) says the next spending review will create serious problems for the coaltion. | |
The political significance of a new spending round — conducted by a Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury on behalf of a Tory Chancellor — is also becoming clearer by the day. The spending review period goes beyond the next election, which raises big questions. Should the Government come up with a shared coalition cuts programme or can the two parties go their separate ways on austerity? Will the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats be tied into a joint economic manifesto when the country next goes to the polls? And if they are, does that mean the two sides will effectively be standing as coalition candidates? Would it give enough certainty to the markets if they signed up to headline totals, then came up with different ways of implementing the savings? Or would this undermine the credibility of the Government ahead of polling day? | |
| • David Milband in the Times (paywall) says François Hollande's election will be good for Europe. | |
| Enter Mr Hollande. He was selected as presidential candidate by the French Socialist Party in a welcome outbreak of electoral realism. He comes from the pragmatic, not to say technocratic, centre of the party. Mr Hollande knows an economic cul-de-sac when he sees one. He lived through the 1981 Mitterrand experiment and has no interest in a retreat to the land of economic make believe. But you don't need to live in the past to seek an alternative to economic masochism. | |
| The danger is not that Mr Hollande is too "dangerous". The truth is that the current policy mix is unsustainable. A new framework will come in the end. The only question is whether it is done through design or collapse. The challenge for Mr Hollande is to confront the flawed policy consensus of austerity — but also boldly to embrace reform. | |
| He has talked of renegotiating the fiscal pact, balancing it with a growth pact and rebalancing the European economic equation. In this he is surely correct. The IMF believes this. The Obama administration is praying for it. The balance between short and medium-term deficit reduction and the respective roles of creditor and debtor countries have been unmentionable around the European Council table for too long. | |
| • Ephraim Hardcastle, the Daily Mail diarist, says that Jack Straw is planning to stand down as the next election and that his son Will is interested in taking his Blackburn seat. | |
| 9.33am: David Laws (pictured), the Lib Dem former chief secretary to the Treasury, was on the Today programme this morning. He said the coalition was always going to make some in the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrat party "uncomfortable" and that it was healthy for them to be allowed to say so. I've taken the quote from PoliticsHome. | 9.33am: David Laws (pictured), the Lib Dem former chief secretary to the Treasury, was on the Today programme this morning. He said the coalition was always going to make some in the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrat party "uncomfortable" and that it was healthy for them to be allowed to say so. I've taken the quote from PoliticsHome. |
| You're always going to get in a coalition, the people on the extreme edges of both parties - the right of the Conservative party and the left of the Liberal Democrats - feeling uncomfortable about the process of coalition, the compromise that involves. Obviously many of those people will want to make sure that the thing they believe in are still being promoted; some of the policies that are not necessarily going to be adopted in a coalition situation where you're looking for the centre ground. | You're always going to get in a coalition, the people on the extreme edges of both parties - the right of the Conservative party and the left of the Liberal Democrats - feeling uncomfortable about the process of coalition, the compromise that involves. Obviously many of those people will want to make sure that the thing they believe in are still being promoted; some of the policies that are not necessarily going to be adopted in a coalition situation where you're looking for the centre ground. |
| But I think that it is possible to do what we've been seeking to do over the last couple of years, which is to have a very coherent and united position, particularly on the most important, the central challenges that we face as a country - in other words the economy, education reform, welfare reform - while demonstrating both parties have their own identities and their own priorities. And I think, actually, that process of letting each party breathe a bit is important to giving coalitions the ability to last, because if you have sort of iron discipline, in which parts of parties can't express themselves at all, that's not actually a stabilising force. | But I think that it is possible to do what we've been seeking to do over the last couple of years, which is to have a very coherent and united position, particularly on the most important, the central challenges that we face as a country - in other words the economy, education reform, welfare reform - while demonstrating both parties have their own identities and their own priorities. And I think, actually, that process of letting each party breathe a bit is important to giving coalitions the ability to last, because if you have sort of iron discipline, in which parts of parties can't express themselves at all, that's not actually a stabilising force. |
| 9.04am: What has Essex done to deserve David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband? All three leaders are on the train today to the spiritual home of the strivers, the grafters, the hard-working families, or whatever else you choose to call the aspirational floating voters who are said to hold the key to electoral success. The Cameron/Clegg event is being billed as a renewal of the coalition wedding vows, a Rose Garden mark 2. As my colleague Juliette Jowit reports, they will say that "there can be no going back" on the unpopular task of slashing government spending and debt. | 9.04am: What has Essex done to deserve David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband? All three leaders are on the train today to the spiritual home of the strivers, the grafters, the hard-working families, or whatever else you choose to call the aspirational floating voters who are said to hold the key to electoral success. The Cameron/Clegg event is being billed as a renewal of the coalition wedding vows, a Rose Garden mark 2. As my colleague Juliette Jowit reports, they will say that "there can be no going back" on the unpopular task of slashing government spending and debt. |
| In a joint event marking two years of the coalition, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, will say that the agreement to make the economy the central plank of the government's programme continued to be the "number one priority". | In a joint event marking two years of the coalition, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, will say that the agreement to make the economy the central plank of the government's programme continued to be the "number one priority". |
| "That was and remains our guiding task, and in these perilous times it's more important than ever for Britain that we stick to it," he will say. "There can be no going back on our carefully judged strategy for restoring the public finances." | "That was and remains our guiding task, and in these perilous times it's more important than ever for Britain that we stick to it," he will say. "There can be no going back on our carefully judged strategy for restoring the public finances." |
| Both leaders will make their case for continuing with harsh spending cuts by arguing that continued borrowing would have to be repaid by "our children". | Both leaders will make their case for continuing with harsh spending cuts by arguing that continued borrowing would have to be repaid by "our children". |
| The Lib Dem leader and deputy PM, Nick Clegg, will say: "Ducking the tough choices would only prolong the pain, condemning the next generation to decades of higher interest rates, poorer public services and fewer jobs." | The Lib Dem leader and deputy PM, Nick Clegg, will say: "Ducking the tough choices would only prolong the pain, condemning the next generation to decades of higher interest rates, poorer public services and fewer jobs." |
| Cameron and Clegg will be up this afternoon. Beforehand, Miliband will be holding his own Q&A with members of the public. He will be arguing that Labour offers a credible alternative. Just in case we missed the point, a Labour spin doctor emailed journalists yesterday suggesting we could write compare and contrast pieces with the headline: "The only way is Essex - but which way?" | Cameron and Clegg will be up this afternoon. Beforehand, Miliband will be holding his own Q&A with members of the public. He will be arguing that Labour offers a credible alternative. Just in case we missed the point, a Labour spin doctor emailed journalists yesterday suggesting we could write compare and contrast pieces with the headline: "The only way is Essex - but which way?" |
| (Bit corny, isn't it? Please, chaps, stick to spinning - and leave the headlines to us.) | (Bit corny, isn't it? Please, chaps, stick to spinning - and leave the headlines to us.) |
| Here's the full agenda for the day. 10am: Ed Miliband holds a Q&A in Harlow, where Labour won control of the council in last week's elections. | Here's the full agenda for the day. 10am: Ed Miliband holds a Q&A in Harlow, where Labour won control of the council in last week's elections. |
| 10am: Andy Coulson launches a new appeal against a high court decision that News Group Newspapers (NGN) does not have to pay his potential legal costs over the phone-hacking affair. | 10am: Andy Coulson launches a new appeal against a high court decision that News Group Newspapers (NGN) does not have to pay his potential legal costs over the phone-hacking affair. |
| 2pm: Glenn Mulcaire begins his supreme court appeal against a ruling saying he cannot against he cannot rely on privilege against self-incrimination in the civil phone-hacking proceedings. | 2pm: Glenn Mulcaire begins his supreme court appeal against a ruling saying he cannot against he cannot rely on privilege against self-incrimination in the civil phone-hacking proceedings. |
| 3.30pm: David Cameron and Nick Clegg hold a Q&A with workers at a factory in Essex. | 3.30pm: David Cameron and Nick Clegg hold a Q&A with workers at a factory in Essex. |
| As usual, I'll be covering all the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. I'll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm. But I'll be wrapping up early because I've got a local election article to write this afternoon. | As usual, I'll be covering all the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. I'll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm. But I'll be wrapping up early because I've got a local election article to write this afternoon. |
| If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm on @AndrewSparrow. | If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm on @AndrewSparrow. |
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