Polly Toynbee on the Livingstone affair

"this latest episode of Evening Standard bullying"

Ken "says what he thinks and does what he thinks will work", his "plain and sometimes impolitic speaking does him good with voters." Some voters anyway.

In contrast, "Michael Howard - no plain speaker he, but carefully weaselling ...". Well, he would, wouldn't he. You know what he is ? They'd sell their own grandmothers.

"Howard's own grandmother died in the Holocaust when Europe refused to save Jews, yet he would tear up the Geneva convention that sprang from that horror and bar people from even seeking asylum here with an arbitrary quota."

Worse still, "an ICM poll finds that two-thirds of voters support it".

Polly loves mankind. It's people she can't stand.

Of course I don't really think Toynbee, for all her sins, is anti-semitic. What's entertaining is that both she and Martin Jacques, in today's Guardian, still don't seem to have grasped the Blair administration's modus operandi seven years on. Talk tough. Soundbite. Initiatives 'with which I can be personally associated'. Crackdown. Blitz. Czar.

And on the ground ? Business as usual. David Blunkett's tenure of the Home Office was a prime example. He talked tough on crime, then found he was running out of prison space - so started releasing prisoners. That sort of thing can't work for ever, but Blair's done pretty well so far.

Jacques writes "Our hoary old friend immigration is back on the agenda, near the very top in fact. The opinion polls suggest that people are worried. New Labour is now desperately seeking to outflank the Tories while, predictably, utterly failing to make any stand against the new populism and its racist subtext. Of course, the charge of racism is denied on all sides: nobody ever owns up to racism. So why, pray, are the unskilled from the European Union welcome while those from the developing world are not?"

The reason people are worried, IMHO, is simple. Numbers, numbers, numbers. And the reason the unskilled of the new EU are welcome is that the Blair administration, unlike other EU nations, put no transitional arrangements in place. Unskilled EU citizens are entitled to come here. The Home Office's 6,000 to 13,000 projected figure is currently 90,000 plus - and that's assuming that the other 910,000 people are, like Michael Howard's grandfather, telling the truth.

Given that people are worried, Blair could shout 'all are welcome' or he can talk tough. He doesn't seem to think the former is a vote-winner. So he'll talk tough, to Martin and Polly's horror. But nothing will happen on the ground. I simply can't see any will, in any public body to take any measures which could possibly be construed by anyone as "racist" - the kiss of death for a career in "public service". This would be a problem even for a Tory administration - under Labour I don't think it possible.

Martin and Polly are right that moving race and immigration into the centre of debate does shift the centre of political gravity 'to the right', in her terms. But this will happen in any event as Native Brits become the minority community, first in the major cities and then in larger towns.

Polly's attitude to the UK electorate has always been that of the nanny who knows what people need better than they do themselves. This tendency extends to our elected Government as well. Fancy the Blair administration, in its simplistic way, thinking that it knows better than Polly how to win an election !

"Labour holds all the strong cards - from economic competence to successful delivery. Yet all that macho front goes weak at the knees if the Tories say boo on race or tax. Meanwhile, Labour's real enemy is behind them: their own defecting voters waiting for leadership and a reason to vote at all. Labour has answers: behind the pledges are all that's been done and five-year plans ahead. What's the real "forward offer"? If they must use market-speak then it's not the "what's-in-it-for-me?" pledges. Social justice is Labour's only Unique Selling Point. And the only one missing from its pledges."