The Tories can reap the 'peace dividend'

While some political arguments never quite go away, recurring down the years in different forms and different contexts, there are others that are very much of their time.

An example is the issue of trade union power, and specifically whether it could legitimately be exercised to thwart the will of the democratically-elected government of the day.

This issue dominated British politics from the late-1960s to the mid-1980s, and was responsible during that time for bringing down at least one Labour government in Jim Callaghan's and one Conservative one in Ted Heath's.

It was eventually resolved by Margaret Thatcher's defeat of the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1985 strike, resulting not just in the marginalisation of the unions but the end of an entire way of life for many mining communities.

Yet to listen to this week's Trades Union Congress in Manchester, you could almost be forgiven for thinking the nation had undergone some kind of collective Life on Mars-type experience.

We learned that the TUC is planning a series of public sector strikes designed to get the government to think again about its spending cuts programme.

There is certainly an argument to be had about whether the cuts are going faster than they need to. There is a related argument about their legitimacy, given the Tories' failure to win an outright majority in May.

But turning the whole debate into a re-run of the 'Who Governs Britain?' controversies of the 1970s hardly seems the best way for the unions to try to win public sympathy for their cause.

Another ancient political argument that seemed to have been settled long ago was the one about Britain's independent nuclear deterrent.

This, too, was a battle that raged during the early 1980s, helping to split the Labour Party in 1981 when the pro-nuclear SDP broke away in dismay at its drift towards unilateralism.

The issue was seemingly put to bed when Labour then proceeded to lose three elections in a row before Tony Blair came along and wiped out all semblance of the party's pacifist tendency – and how.

But by a supreme historical irony, that bit of Labour which broke away to defend the nuclear deterrent has ultimately morphed into that bit of the Lib-Con coalition which now wants to ditch it.

Of all the many issues on which the two sides of the coalition disagree, this promises to be one of the most toxic, with many backbench Tories seeing the renewal of Trident as an article of faith.

Delaying the decision until after the next election will undoubtedly save a few bob – but it is also sure to re-open the debate over whether we should have a nuclear deterrent at all.

Yet for Prime Minister David Cameron, there is a rare political opportunity here – so long as he can square his backbenchers.

For if any government is going to radically reshape Britain's defence capability – and reap the potential 'peace dividend' in terms of savings - then this one is probably best-placed to do it.

Labour could never have abandoned Trident - for the simple reason that it would have brought back all those fears that the party could not be trusted with the nation's defences.

But the Tories, who have never had that problem, might just be able to.

By the same token, the Tories will find it much harder to reform the welfare state – something Labour really should have done in its first term when Mr Blair was carrying all before him.

For Mr Cameron, cutting Trident, and maybe finding a less costly form of nuclear deterrence, could prove to be the easy bit.

Balls holds the key

Politics has seen many changes over the past couple of decades - but if there is one thing that has changed out of all recognition, it is the science of opinion polling.

I have been in this game just about long enough to remember the infamous BBC exit poll in 1987 predicting a hung Parliament. Mrs Thatcher's Tories won a 102-seat majority.

By contrast, this year's exit poll - also predicting a hung Parliament - was very nearly spot-on, not just in terms of the overall outcome but also in terms of the number of seats won by each party.

But if most elections are becoming easier to predict, Labour leadership election are surely the exception that proves the rule.

There are two fairly straightforward reasons for this. Firstly, the single transferable voting system, which usually means that contests are decided on voters' second and sometimes even third preferences.

Secondly, the make-up of Labour's electoral college, comprising MPs, trade unions, and party members, which makes it nigh-on impossible to conduct a meaningful opinion poll.

So the widespread expectation that South Shields MP David Miliband will be crowned as Gordon Brown's successor later this month needs to be taken, at the very least, with a small pinch of salt.

While the Shadow Foreign Secretary certainly has the most support among MPs, and probably among party members, no-one quite knows what the union ballots will come up with, or how important those second preferences will prove to be.

If anyone is in any doubt about this, they only have to look at what happened in the party's deputy leadership election in 2007, when Alan Johnson and Hilary Benn were seen as favourites by the pundits.

They completely underestimated the level of support among the grassroots for Harriet Harman and Jon Cruddas, whose second preference votes ultimately won Ms Harman the job.

That said, leadership elections are not the same as deputy leadership elections where you might feel more able to vote for someone you like the sound of, without necessarily worrying about whether they are capable of winning a general election.

There is a good argument for saying that if the same six candidates as contested the deputy leadership in 2007 had been contesting the leadership, Mr Johnson would have won.

The conventional wisdom in this election has been that Ed Miliband is everyone's second favourite candidate, and that if David is not sufficiently far enough ahead on first preferences, he risks being overhauled by his brother in the latter stages.

The key to it, as with the 2007 deputy leadership election, will be what happens to the second preferences of the third-placed candidate.

Following his strong performance in bashing the coalition, and showing real fighting qualities over the course of the campaign, I think this will in all likelihood be Ed Balls.

I am quite sure this is why talk of a 'pact' under which Mr Balls would become David Miliband's Shadow Chancellor has been doing the rounds over the past couple of weeks.

As it is, I am not sure there ever was such a pact or whether it would even be deliverable.

Mr Balls and the elder Miliband do not appear to share the same views about the importance of tackling the deficit vis-à-vis the need for economic growth, and that may make his appointment as Shadow Chancellor somewhat problematical.

Either way, by my reckoning Ed Miliband will probably need to win at least three fifths of Mr Balls' transfers in order to pip his brother to the post.

My hunch is that he won't, and that it will indeed be David wearing the crown a fortnight tomorrow.

For PM, it has to be DM

No leadership election occurs in a political vacuum. For good or ill, the current race for the leadership of the Labour Party will invariably be shaped in part by the context in which it is taking place.

Like it or not, it is the Blair-Brown years, and their ultimately shattering denouement in the general election defeat of 6 May, which provide the inescapable backdrop to this contest.

For at least one of the candidates, Ed Balls, that defeat already looks likely to have dealt a terminal blow to his leadership aspirations.

For all his pugnacious qualities - none of the candidates have landed as many blows on the Lib-Con coalition as he has - the party was never going to replace the defeated Gordon Brown with, well, Gordon Brown Mark II.

But if this has been a difficult election in which to be a Brownite - all the candidates have been anxious to distance themselves to a greater or lesser degree from the former Prime Minister - being seen as a Blairite is not much of a recommendation either.

If by publishing his memoirs in the week the leadership ballot papers went out, Tony Blair hoped to influence the contest in favour of his protege David Miliband, it only goes to show how delusional he has become.

Mr Blair's account of his 'Journey' is already a bestseller, but many Labour members will be aghast at his decision to kick Mr Brown when he is down while simultaneously refusing to criticise Prime Minister David Cameron.

Then again, why would he, since he too clearly believes that the coalition is a Blairite continuity administration, doing exactly the things he would have done had he not been thwarted by nasty old Gordon.

So far from boosting the elder Miliband's candidature, the book looks likely to provoke a backlash against Mr Blair which could well harm the Shadow Foreign Secretary.

But in my view, that would be a shame, because, aside from all the factionalism, David Miliband is the best qualified candidate to take Labour back into government.

I have to confess that at the outset of this contest, I was leaning more towards Andy Burnham, which would have been the first time Durham North MP Kevan Jones and I had agreed about anything.

But while Mr Burnham is clearly the candidate most attuned to the needs of the North, his oddly tribal, Old Labour-ish campaign has seemed at odds with the 'new politics' of co-operation and coalition.

Of the other candidates, Ed Balls has already been dealt with, Diane Abbot would clearly take Labour back to irrelevance, while I wonder whether Ed Miliband is really ready for the top job.

I like a lot of what he has had to say about the need for Labour to regain its values before it can think of regaining power, and the 'Red Ed' jibes from the Blairite camp are self-evidently ludicrous.

For me, Ed's problem is not his politics, but the fact that he comes across as rather well-meaning and naive - a nice guy, an original thinker even, but not quite tough enough to be leader - and maybe PM - just yet.

By contrast, the one quality his elder brother possesses above all is that, having already held a major office of state, you can easily imagine him as Prime Minister now.

Mr Blair was at pains in his TV interview with Andrew Marr on Wednesday to stress that the South Shields MP is his own man, and that is one thing he was right about.

As a North-East Blairite, he could easily have got sucked into the silly tribalism that affected some of his former parliamentary colleagues in the region who saw any criticism of their beloved leader as a betrayal, but to his credit he never did.

I have no doubt at all that if he wins, David's first priority will be to unite the party and draw a line under the feuding once and for all.

But will he win? That is the question to which I will turn my attentions in next week's column.