“Parents should lose their child benefit if they refuse to immunise their children with the MMR jab, a senior Labour MP has suggested. Families will have to prove their child’s vaccination records are up to date to qualify for handouts. [Jon Cruddas] suggested the measure, which is already in place in Australia, could be a way to link behaviour with state benefits and services. However, Labour rushed to dissociate itself from the idea last night, saying ‘it is not part of the policy review’.” – Daily Mail
“At the Labour conference in Brighton, Ed Miliband yesterday unveiled proposals to force firms to train a British apprentice for each worker hired from outside the European Union. The Labour leader claimed the measure showed his party was now tough on immigration after the border control shambles under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But the policy rapidly unravelled when it emerged that recruiting only British-born apprentices would be illegal under EU law.” – Daily Express
“Paul Kenny, the leader of the GMB union who chairs the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation, won huge applause at the Brighton conference when he attacked Mr Miliband’s plan for union members to “opt in” to supporting the party financially. Mr Kenny warned: ‘The desire to expand party membership is a shared one, but let nobody be under any illusion that as collective organisations the removal or sale of our collective voice is not on the agenda.’ ” – The Independent
> Yesterday:
“Labour will need to cement a broad-based appeal if it is to win and govern. Relying on the backing of a left-leaning third of the electorate was never going to work. The Tories have done their homework on what appeals to the centre ground and Labour’s polling suggests the party has further to go to cater to these crucial voters. [The public] want an analysis of how Mr Miliband sees the country’s needs and how Labour will differ from the coalition in meeting them. “One Nation” is a good line for a banner but needs an argument to support it and to set out an alternative.” – Financial Times
“As far as I was concerned, he was either catastrophically inept or misguided when it came to his public interventions in the press — or he was just totally out for himself…On a professional level, I tore my hair out at the way the Treasury publicly exacerbated our problem because of their paranoia. Journalists could get them to issue ridiculously aggressive quotes simply by hinting there was some briefing against Alistair. All the sense of grip, purpose and professionalism there had been at the Treasury under Gordon as Chancellor had disappeared.” – Daily Mail
“It is one of the factors tending to distinguish the Left in politics from the Right, that the former frequently regard the latter as actually wicked, if not evil; whereas most Tories tend to regard the Left as just misguided. This was explained by a Labour-voting friend who told me ‘the Left are principally concerned to feel good about themselves, so the worse they can paint their ideological enemies, the better they themselves must be. Perhaps it’s even based on a psychological fear of their own dark side’.” – Daily Mail
“Greg Barker, the energy minister, told the Telegraph he was confident that proposed subsidy levels – which would be see support cut by 13pc over the next five years – were high enough. ‘Investors will always want more,’ he said. ‘We believe that what we have set will be sufficient to drive the necessary scale of investment and strikes the right balance between the interests of the consumer and the necessary return for investors to ensure we deliver the capacity.’ ” – Daily Telegraph
“A revamped campaign to lift the ban on new grammar schools is to be deployed by UKIP to win over Tory voters in next year’s local elections. Nigel Farage’s team calculate that championing a revival of grammar schools will put “clear purple water” between UKIP and the other parties. They believe that voters are currently unaware that the party is in favour of a major expansion of the number of grammars.” – The Times (£)
“Angela Merkel was handed a third term as German Chancellor with a resounding show of support last night, but faced negotiating a coalition with her centre-left rivals after falling just short of an overall majority. As the last votes were being counted, it seemed that Mrs Merkel would be plunged into weeks of hard bargaining with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to try to repeat the coalition she formed for her first term in 2005 to 2009. The SPD came a distant second in the election on about 26 per cent.” – The Times (£)
> Yesterday: Andrew Marshall’s live blog of the results
“The terror attack on a Kenyan shopping centre that has left 68 dead was being led by the white English widow of a 7/7 bomber, it was claimed last night. Soldiers said a white woman wearing a veil was shouting orders to gunmen in Arabic during the bloody massacre inside the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi. Islamist terror group Al Shabaab claimed it carried out the atrocity in which three Britons were killed and 175 people were left injured.” – Daily Mail
“Pakistan’s embattled Christian community suffered the most deadly attack in its history on Sunday when a pair of Taliban suicide bombers blew themselves up inside a church in the troubled city of Peshawar, killing 81 and wounding about 140. The midday attack on the historic church was one of the most lethal aimed at civilians in Peshawar, a city that has been repeatedly struck by militant groups who control swaths of the nearby tribal areas.’ – The Guardian
“Columnists and opinion pages might not cause wild changes of direction of the British supertanker, but I hope we help the crew to have a better understanding of the dangers and opportunities presented by the journey ahead. I should finish my party political broadcast for opinion journalism at this point, but will conclude with one additional point. Guess what Mark Textor does when he is not producing gold standard research for his clients? He writes a column for an Australian newspaper.” – The Times (£)