Blogposts tagged 'Labour'

It's easy to talk about the government as if it were a single, all-powerful, bureaucratic machine, with tentacles stretching out from Downing Street into every aspect of our daily lives. Of course, it simply isn't like that.

Governments are a collection of individuals: from the 22 who sit round the Cabinet table, through the hundred or so ministers in various government departments, their political special advisers and civil servants. Throw in the external pressures of the media, business, and organisations like Greenpeace, and you see that far from being a single machine, it is a complicated alliance of individuals who come together to form the body politic. And as the Environment Minister Hilary Benn said today, it's important that they all "get it" on climate change.

Today Brown will deliver his first conference speech as Prime Minister, and you can't help but feel the excitement amongst Labour delegates. All the talk is about whether he will call a snap election.

Last night I was at the Social Market Foundation event and had a long chat to John Denham - the minister who notably resigned over the Iraq war in 2003. Now he is in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills. He gave me some very good reasons why Brown might want to call an election sooner rather than later - mostly to do with the amount of money in the Conservative Party war chest.

Scots head to the voting booths tomorrow and the latest and last Scotsman/ICM opinion poll is saying it is too close to call.

Now there are a lot of reasons for Scots to be upset with Labour and want to oust them, but none seems more symbolic of the situation than the Scottish Labour party's stance on nuclear power.