Latest Labour news

The Labour Government today unveiled new service targets every local council will be working towards, and published them on a new website so that residents can measure the success of their own council. The reforms reduce the number of targets from around 1,200 to just 198, 35 of which will be core targets. The top 35 targets have been chosen by the councils themselves to ensure that they are what matter most to people living in the area. Councils which perform well against their chosen targets will receive extra funds from a central government pool of £340m. Gordon Brown said that the new local area agreements would "drive up standards, respond to local concerns and help people hold their local council to account".

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What others are saying

• Interesting detail in the latest Mori poll
  Snowflake5 delves deeply into the latest Mori poll concluding that: "Amongst the under 35's, the most popular category was "don't know" followed by Liberal and then New labour and Old Labour. Thatcherism by contrast is most popular with the over 55's. Given that Cameron's lead is based on the None of These/Don't Knows, it appears he is benefiting from simply being very vague indeed and deliberately not defining his policies. His chief danger is the evidence from The Telegraph that "The majority of new Conservative candidates selected to fight the next election are unabashed supporters of Margaret Thatcher's ideals"."
• Labour Gain Council seat in Hatfield Central
  Mike Hobday, the prospective Labour Parliamentary candidate for the Welwyn Hatfield constituency, offers: "Congratulations to newly elected Labour Councillor, Maureen Cook, who has just gained the Hatfield Central council seat from the Conservative Party. Maureen's victory is a victory for all Hatfield residents who are rightly fed up with the Tories' mismanagement of Hatfield's town centre and their dismissive attitude to the town centre campaign."
• Conservative cancer improvement?
  Hopi Sen makes a wry observation about the Conservatives' plan to "to increase Cancer survival rates to the average of the EU15 by 2015. Yet go to the National Cancer reform strategy and you find this "by 2012 our cancer services can and should become among the best in the world." So why are the Tories putting the target back three years?"
• The Conservatives: “something old, not much new, something borrowed, something blue”
  Progress has published a speech by James Purnell, where he makes a stinging attack on the Conservative Leader: "This is the real charge against the Tory leader: that he has no settled convictions. He just has bits and pieces along the way. And you can't lead if you are confused. When he wrote that 2005 Manifesto, he forgot to mention the environment. When he became leader, his focus groups told him the environment was a bridge issue back to the centre ground. He wanted to become new. So off he went to the Arctic Circle. Vote Blue, Go Green, we were told. Then the oil price went up, the focus groups turned and all of a sudden he's less keen. So now we find him, at Prime Minister's questions, attacking the very green taxes that he himself had proposed a few months earlier. His politics are like the parting in his hair. One week it's on the right, then it shifts to the left, then all of a sudden it's down the middle."
• New leader of Edinburgh’s Labour Party
  Congratulations to Councillor Andrew Burns after he was named the new leader of Edinburgh's Labour Party. Currently the group's education spokesman, he will officially take over from Ewan Aitken next Tuesday evening.