Constituency Party backs
Ed Miliband
Ed Miliband was nominated for the Labour Party leadership by an all-member meeting of the Constituency Labour Party on 23 July 
2010.
All candidates had some support, but after discussion of the merits of each candidate a vote was taken, which was won by Ed Miliband.
The nomination is purely an expression of support by the Constituency Party. The election will take place according to the three-college system (members, trade unions and parliamentarians). In the members' college, each paid-up member will have a vote provided they joined before 8 September 2010.
Voting booklets will go out on 1 September 2010 and ballot papers must be returned by 22 September. The result will be announced at the Labour Party Conference (26 - 30 September in Manchester).
Join now and help choose Labour's leader
If you join before 8
September 2010, you will be able to take
part in the leadership election. The normal six-month qualifying rule
has been waived on this occasion.
So, if you left the party on
some matter of principle during the period of Labour Government, you
can now rejoin and have your say in reshaping its policies for the
future.
Nominations have now closed and the candidates with the required 33 nominations from MPs are:
For more information, go to the Labour Party website.
The websites of the candidates are:
Government to increase child poverty
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has confirmed Labour's view that the LibDemCon budget is regressive. Their research shows that the poorest familes will be hit the hardest, losing over 5% of their income by 2014. This is a bigger loss than pensioners or any other household group except the very richest.
James Browne, co-author of the IFS report said: "It seems likely that, once changes to other benefits are taken into account, child poverty will go up."
The budget may also have breached the law. Under the Equality Act 2010, championed by Harriet Harman, the Treasury had an obligation to consider the impact on women, the disabled and ethnic minorities. The Equalities and Human Rights Commission announced that it was investigating whether this obligation was met. For example, the budget contained curbs on the Disability Living Allowance
Justin Webb, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on 25 August 2010, repeatedly asked the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Mark Hoban, whether this statutory obligation had been met and Mark Hoban repeatedly avoided answering the question.
For other comments on George Osborne's regressive budget, click here.
GPs to manage the health service
.....as well as looking after you.
Primary Care Trusts, only just re-organized into larger bodies for efficiency, are being abolished and the task of managing the finances of the NHS is being given to GPs instead.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them do not want this additional task, which surely must result in them having to employ staff, such as accountants, to help them carry it out.
They may even need to set up organizations to carry out the work for them. Perhaps they could call these organizations "primary care trusts" ......
Government prescribes chaos for planning and education
Secondary school transfer is already a contentious matter, but at least the County Council can ensure some consistency in how it works. However, the Government is already taking action to allow most schools to become academies.
Those that do will be able to set their own entry criteria. So parents will have to find out what the criteria are for each school and apply separately to those that they choose for their children. It is not clear if the County Council will have any role in facilitating this process.
The Government has also told councils that they may ignore the existing Regional Spatial Strategy, if they so wish. Apart from the retrograde step of ending regional co-operation, it leaves a vacuum in the guidance available to planning authorities.
There will be a new planning act to deal with this in some way or other, but it is understood that this may not be passed into law for two years. Meanwhile, different councils will, no doubt, take different views, ending any co-operative effort to build the houses that we need or to plan for improved transport.
Osborne makes "classic error"
This is the view of Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist and former chief economist at the World Bank. He says that Chancellor George Osborne confuses national economics with household economics.
"You cut expenditures and the economy goes down. We have lots of experiments to show this, thanks to Herbert Hoover and the IMF ... economies will get weaker, investment will be stymied and it's a downward vicious spiral." He says that Japan did this in 1997; just as it was recovering, it raised VAT and went into another recession.
Japan is now set to have a government debt of over 200%, far worse than the UK, according to figures from OECD and the EU.
See earlier comments by Stiglitz here.
NHS Number One for efficiency
A Commonwealth Fund report rated the NHS as the most efficient in their study. Andy Burnham, shadow health secretary, warns that this rating could slip as Labour's targets, which brought about such a dramatic reduction in waiting times for operations, are dismantled by the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.
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