The Green Box

The looming result of what has been a dreary, months-long Labour leadership battle suddenly seems relevant. Were the outcome to be decided by the effectiveness or otherwise of the candidates’ campaigns, Mr Balls would be the clear winner. His pugnacious critique of Mr Osborne’s strategy and his harrying of the education secretary Michael Gove have been quietly cheered even by Lib Dems. Mr Balls, though, is as divisive as he is clever. An acolyte of Gordon Brown, he has turned sharply to the left. Old hands will recall that Mr Brown, too, was once a formidable figure at the opposition despatch box. As we discovered, beating up the other side’s prime minister is not the same as being prime minister.

In normal times, a roar of protest from the TUC would irritate the government of the day and alienate citizens anticipating closed schools and frozen transport. In this abnormal era, the script has changed for the political variant of Jurassic Park. The unions' conference in Manchester this week shows that, while Margaret Thatcher's "enemy within" may be shrunken and disempowered, even its bitterest opponents cannot dismiss it as an anachronism. Despite the unhelpful threat of co-ordinated strikes, the TUC now has a hotline to Middle England.

In the Liberal-Conservative coalition, freedom is the fault line that could make or break the Government. It’s no coincidence that the policy of “free schools” is already causing concern on the Liberal Democrat benches. There will be more irritation if the Tories press ahead — as expected — with their plan to create a free market in higher education by raising the cap on tuition fees. The welfare reforms are turning into a battle between those who see the transfer of disabled people from incapacity benefit to unemployment support as a liberation or a humiliation.

'Ed Miliband will never be prime minister. You know it, I know it," wrote Matthew D'Ancona in the Telegraph. The reason? "David offers his party years and years of work." Ed in contrast merely offers "a big smile and a hug". Many think the same way. David Blunkett thinks David by far the better candidate because he has "the experience and grasp of global challenges". Despite Ed's surge in the polls, many still argue that David's five years of cabinet experience qualify him for the job and that he will make a far more formidable leader and threat to the Conservatives because of it.

The Labour leadership front-runner David Miliband received a frosty reception from TUC delegates at hustings last night after he refused to commit himself to joining trade unionists in a protest march against public spending cuts. The Shadow Foreign Secretary was the only one of the five candidates in the Labour leadership race to decline to commit himself to marching with union members on October 19, the day before the Chancellor announces the results of the Comprehensive Spending Review.

Mr Boles' proposal is predicated on the assumption that Lib Dems and Tories are united in their view that the Coalition is a good thing. We shall know more clearly next week the extent to which Nick Clegg's love affair with David Cameron has permeated the lower ranks of the party faithful. The nightmare for Mr Clegg is that too many among the rank and file simply have no wish to "defend the indefensible". By the time of next year's Lib-Dem gathering there will be resolutions from the hundreds of defeated Lib Dem councillors, at next May's local elections, for complete withdrawal from the Cameron Coalition. Mr Boles' proposal, however, may be a more practical life-line for Lib-Dem survival than anything likely to be on offer from a new Labour leader – especially if that turns out to be Ed Miliband.

David Cameron has told Conservatives to be polite to Liberal Democrat election opponents, but his aides insist he has “no plans” to propose a formal non-aggression pact with his coalition partners.

You can see just why the Liberal Democrat proposal to exempt all those earning under £10,000 a year from income tax was such a potent electoral promise – and why it had been included in the Coalition agreement with the Conservatives. It is certainly true that too many people at the lower end of the income scale have been dragged into the taxman's net in recent years; but the problem for any Government is that if it wants to raise a lot of tax, it has to tax a lot of people. The super-rich are too few (and too internationally mobile) to keep public expenditure at the levels they currently are – or anything like it. In any case, the top 1 per cent of earners already contributes about 22 per cent of total income tax, and the top-earning 10 per cent provide well over half the aggregate income tax collected by HMRC – which is what you would expect under a progressive tax system.

BBC unions last night declared war on the Conservatives with an extraordinary threat to black out coverage of David Cameron’s keynote speech to the Tory party conference. They unveiled a series of damaging strikes which will also disrupt its reporting of Chancellor George Osborne’s spending review next month. The two 48-hour walkouts, in protest at plans to overhaul the corporation’s gold-plated pensions, have been deliberately timed to wipe out coverage of the two most high-profile events in this autumn’s political calendar.

There can be no doubt that both Parliament and the public are outraged about the revelations that Andy Coulson, disgraced former editor of the News of the World, now occupies a senior position in Downing Street. Two Parliamentary enquiries and an impassioned series of questions in the House tell their own story. And as my colleague James Macintyre has pointed out, there are deeper issues of the relationship between Murdoch's newspapers and the police to be considered, too.