The Some unions want Hutton out:

Gordon Brown is coming under pressure from the unions to remove John Hutton from his post as Business Secretary, The Times has learnt.

Union leaders say there has been a complete breakdown in relations with the leading Blairite minister and are demanding his scalp in an autumn reshuffle.

Mr Hutton’s future is set to become a trial of strength for the Prime Minister after colleagues and business organisations made it clear that they would be unhappy at his removal in such circumstances.

However, one senior trade union official said: “Some of the trade unions can’t sit in the same room as Hutton. There has been an absolute breakdown in relations.”

About bloody time. How can anyone who even claims a vague affiliation to socialism or social democracy cope with that man? He’s the absolute caricature of a closet Tory.

(Hat-tip: New Direction)

David Davis threatened to resign if forced to vote for. In the event, despite the protests of the loathsome Gove, the party whipped against and Ann Widdecombe was the sole rebel rather than their leader.

Tony Benn last night expressed incredulity over the outcome and now I can whole-heartedly join him. If Labour is now so authoritarian that only the most embittered and deranged aspect of the Tory’s far, hard-right, so niche as to be embodied in a single solitary woman, is prepared to give them support then the political landscape is a gnarled and confusing place that holds no appeal to me; and has shifted from making little sense to no sense at all.

I shall enjoy peering across the Atlantic.

Then think again. Have a look here. It’s a leaked Tory strategy document, and it confirms everything doubters thought about Cameron’s cuddly image: it’s a sham. They want to be, “as radical in social reform as Mrs. Thatcher was in economic reform.”

That tells us two things about the modern Conservative Party, at least. The first is that they still haven’t got over their past. Rather than setting themselves modern standards and aspirations, they’re measuring themselves by the past, in the grisly shape of Maggie Thatcher. They’re looking back, not forward.

The second, perhaps more tenuously, is that they want their policies to be like Thatcher’s. Think what they were, on social terms: bullying single parents, Whitehousian prudery, the removal of whichever props for the unfortunate she could get away with electorally.

The rhetoric is certainly there. Check the last sentences of the last two paragraphs. They’re going to have, “properly enforced, tough and effective laws” - presumably whether they work or not, by the sound of it. So, fascism on drugs, the victimisation of young people, yadda yadda. Remind you of anyone? Yes, that’s right, Mrs. T.

And the second sentence? They’ll be “reducing demands on the state,”* and ensuring the country, “live[s] within our means,” and making, “our economy strong and competitive for the long term.” Remind you of anyone? Chyeah. Thatcher, and possibly John Hutton. The demand to reduce demand on the state is straight out of her speeches: she “rolled back the frontiers of the state,” in her Bruges speech.

Do they not realise that we’ve got “poverty, inequality and stalled social mobility” - their words - because of her legacy? I doubt it.

*By upping police numbers, and consequently spending with them? Oh, wait, of course. They’ll be scrapping benefits for single mothers at the same time, as they’re clearly “a threat to marriage.” It’s what they wanted to do, and the rhetoric isn’t changing.