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His latest Sunday evening column In Gateshead this week, Labour took another step on its journey to discover fresh political ideas. It is an objective that it is easy to say, but hard to achieve. If there has been a trend post-Thatcher, it is that politics has become more consensual, focussing on fewer ideas. Is Labour seriously attempting to reverse this trend? Can it really discover something fresh and create a winning formula? Labour starts from square one. They have…

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Was he right to say Dave was “writing propaganda for the EDL”? The big ongoing row this weekend has been Cameron’s speech in Munich in which he’s attacked “state multiculturalism” in his first major statement as PM on the causes of terrorism. The UK, he argued, needed a stronger national identity to prevent groups turning to extremism. In one controversial passage on how Muslim civil organisations should be judged Cameron asked: “Do they believe in universal human rights – including…

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What would real reform look like? The events in Egypt might have dominated the news this week but it’s domestic politics that determines the results of elections unless British citizens or troops are directly involved. In that respect, the most significant policy debate this year so far has been around the future of the NHS. It has been said by those on both sides that the government is proposing the most radical reforms in the Service’s more than six decades…

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Guardian Is it time for the veteran broadcaster to bow out? The Guardian is reporting that David Dimbleby is in a row with the BBC over a plan to move the production centre of his weekly Question Time programme from London to Glasgow as part of the overall objectives to shift activities out of the capital. The paper reports that David Dimbleby is furious about the resignation of the QT editor Ed Havard, whom he hand-picked to run the show….

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Why go to Gateshead for today’s big event? One of the big political stories of the day has been the big speech by Ed Miliband in Gateshead at which we’ve seen a new Labour slogan (Helping families get on) and a new idea – the “British Promise“. The latter, he said, was the notion that that every generation will do better than the last – something that is now under threat. He argued that “there is now a real and…

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