Loyal Opposition

Daveybloke's little yellow chums must be feeling especially proud of themselves today. Their latest facilitation, of Iain Duncan Smith's new Poor Law, will result in households "further down the income distribution" suffering the greatest loss of income; this according to the Department for Workfare and Privation's own assessment. Wee Nicky made some noises about his masters' strivers-and-shirkers rhetoric before meekly voting along; a few Deputy Conservatives expressed disquiet, and a grand total of four rebelled. We can only await the inevitable manifesto claim, pilfered from the Reverend Blair's excuses for the slaughter and torture in Iraq: "It would have been worse without us."

Elsewhere, Duncan Smith's frère et semblable, Liam Byrne, has for some time countered the Conservative distinction between strivers and claimants with a Labour distinction between strivers and unemployed persons, but he did just about manage to mention the recent tax cut for those on seven-figure salaries; while the Lower (formerly Upper) Miliband had a bit of a blather about acceptable envelopes, in an apparent effort to show that he is almost as different from Ed Balls as either of them are from the Conservatives.