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Will it be the official statisticians wot did it?

Will it be the official statisticians wot did it?

Could Brown rue the day he made the ONS independent? When historians come to examine the final period of Mr. Brown’s career and Labour’s losses in the 2009/2010 general election will the decision to create the UK Statistics Authority and make the Office of National Statistics independent be seen as the decisive error? For yet again this morning the big news in several of the papers stems from official statistics that are hugely embarrassing to the government – numbers that…

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Is Harriet becoming Labour’s Sarah Palin?

Is Harriet becoming Labour’s Sarah Palin?

MailOnline Can the party stop its Deputy “going rogue“ Those who followed the White House race closely last autumn will recall how in the final weeks John McCain’s campaign became plagued by the antics of his ticket partner, Sarah Palin. The V-P nominee, realising that they were facing defeat, began to develop her own agenda and efforts by the offical McCain campaign to rein her were just pushed aside. Palin, it was said, became more interested in positioning herself for…

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Is a global role for Gord just Labour wishful thinking?

Is a global role for Gord just Labour wishful thinking?

guardian.co.uk What do we think of the Brown lifeboat rumour? One good measure of how badly things are going for a leader is when apparent loyal supporters spend their time trying to work out how their person can be got out of the way painlessly leaving them some dignity. Last summer, at the bottom of Brown Slump I, a story was going round of a possible global role for Brown in Africa funded by the Gates Foundation with Bill Clinton…

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Is accepting some responsibility the first step to recovery?

Is accepting some responsibility the first step to recovery?

guardian.co.uk Has Kettle got it right about Mr. Brown? There’s a biting column on Mr. Brown and the economic crisis by Martin Kettle in the Guardian this morning on the reluctance of the Prime Minister to take any responsibility whatsoever for what’s gone on in Britain’s banks. Discussing first Mr. Brown’s tendency to put tactics ahead of strategy Kettle looks at what’s gone on the the past few weeks and makes the case that a reluctance by Brown to accept…

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Is this another sign that Labour’s power is ebbing away?

Is this another sign that Labour’s power is ebbing away?

Mail online Have the spinners lost control of the “official statistics”? There’s a big story running this morning about with the highly embarrassing news that the number of foreign workers increased by 175,000 to 2.4 million last year while the number of British workers fell by 234,000 to 27 million. To me what makes this interesting is not the jobs story but that what used to be the all-powerful Number 10 spin operation had no idea of what was coming…

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Is “Woolie’s Woman” the defining demographic?

Is “Woolie’s Woman” the defining demographic?

Cartoon first published on December 11 2008 Is “She” the shorthand for the end of NuLab? A key media development in the past eight weeks has been the regularity with which programmes makers and writers have looked to former Woolworths employees, almost all of them women, to illustrate what’s gone wrong with the economy. BBC2’s Newsnight did it again last night. So while “Mondeo Man” and “Worcester Woman” might have defined key voters in recent elections the 2009/2010 general version…

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Is this how the crisis gets linked to Number 10?

Is this how the crisis gets linked to Number 10?

How much was a key Brown advisor behind the HBOS fall? The appearance before the commons committee of the bank bosses and the story of the whistle-blower who tried to warn of the dangers of HBOS’s strategy get wide coverage this morning but it’s only really the Times and the Independent that highlight the political dangers to the government. For until now the main charge against the PM was that he was Chancellor during a critical decade when many of…

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Labour drop into the 20s with Populus

Labour drop into the 20s with Populus

CONSERVATIVES 42% (-1) LABOUR 28% (-5) LIB DEMS 18% (+3) ..and the LDs get a 3 point boost The Populus survey for tomorrow’s Times will be published officially in a few minutes but I’ve just been given the tip off about the numbers from a normally reliable source. [The figures have now been confirmed – see the Times story here] So Populus becomes the third pollster to be showing Labour back in the 20s – further evidence that the Brown…

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