Ed Miliband

Labour Ooze Hatred Of The Successful And Ignorance Of The Working Class

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

James Blunt Chris Bryant MP

 

We may as well just admit it: the Labour Party has a serious class problem.

Just as the memory of Ed Miliband’s hasty sacking of his ally Emily Thornberry for the crime of tweeting a picture of a white van was starting to fade from memory, the new Shadow Culture Secretary, Chris Bryant, found himself on the wrong end of a tongue-lashing from singer James Blunt after appearing to suggest that some of Britain’s most successful performing artists had succeeded at the expense of their working class peers.

Both the Guardian and the Telegraph sum up the story well enough, complete with blow-by-blow accounts of the duelling letters exchanged between Bryant and Blunt. And the Spectator is quite right to point out the irony of a Labour shadow minister decrying the lack of ladders to success for working class artists, when it was the Labour legacy of closing grammar schools that so contributed to the problem of lack of social mobility.

On the plus side, parts of James Blunt’s angry letter resemble the anti-Labour comeback that every Tory wishes that he or she could make, if only they could think a little quicker on their feet:

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How Will Lying About Immigration And The Deficit Improve Trust In Politics?

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

Spectator David Cameron Deficit Debt Reduction Lie 2

 

Somehow, the message still isn’t getting through.

“We just want you to level with us, own up to your past failings and tell us where you really stand on the key issues we care about”, scream Britain’s voters to their increasingly detatched political leaders, in the subtext to every single opinion poll or by-election result of 2014. In response, our political leaders scratch their heads and look confused. “So you want us to pretend as though we understand and respect you?”

Britain’s established political parties have been haemorrhaging support to the new insurgents – UKIP, the Green Party and the fastest growing bloc of all, those who have given up on politics and voting entirely – since the inconclusive 2010 general election and subsequent formation of the coalition government laid bare how vanishingly little difference there really is between the red, blue and yellow team consensus. And as the 2015 general election approaches, each of the establishment parties will come face to face with their own reckoning: David Cameron’s Conservatives face the humiliating prospect of failing to win an outright majority for the second consecutive time, Ed Miliband’s Labour Party behold the implosion of their 35% core vote strategy and Nick Clegg’s LibDems hunker down and wait for the sweet release of electoral oblivion.

In a sane world, the growing revulsion and contempt felt by the British people toward their political class might by now have led to a degree of introspection and a nagging desire among politicians and political parties to cease their endless cycle of cynical, self-destructive behaviour. But we do not live in a sane world. And so the response of Britain’s main parties to the groundswell of public anger at their inability to be honest about their past records and current policies is not to come clean and give honesty a try, but rather to double-down and turn up the brazen deceit to “maximum”.

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Ed Miliband Talks About The Deficit, Says Absolutely Nothing

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Ed Miliband Speech Deficit Austerity Economic Policy Media SPS

 

How many times have we been told to expect a “big speech” from Labour’s ex-Leader in waiting, Ed Miliband?

Today is the day when Ed Miliband finally gets serious and fires the starting gun for the 2015 general election campaign, we were told. This is the day when the Labour party will stop being scared of its own shadow or apologetic for its past, and tackle the issue of Britain’s persistent budget deficit head-on. In fact, the latest oration by Miliband was so heavily trailed by Labour’s press team that even seasoned and cynical Westminster reporters were teased into expecting some kind of new policy proposal or big announcement. And what did we get? The same lack of specifics and anticlimactic sense of time wasted that Ed Miliband always manages to evoke.

This blog has long pointed out that Ed Miliband wouldn’t know a great political speech if one jumped off the teleprompter and hit him square in the face – a typical Miliband speech is a more or less random assortment of short, standalone platitudes, focus group-tested to ensure their bland inoffensiveness, and none of which exceed ten words so as not to tax the brain of the listener, whose intelligence is so rudely and continually insulted. This being so, it was a pity to see much of the mainstream press, starved of inspiring political oratory for so long, lazily repeating back the assertion that this was indeed a Big Speech by Miliband, just because the Labour press office labelled it so.

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Emily Thornberry And The Sorry Era Of Sudden Death Politics

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Emily Thornberry Rochester England Flag House Resignation SPS

 

Three words and a picture.

That’s all it took to bring Labour MP Emily Thornberry‘s front bench career as Shadow Attorney General to an end, after being tried and found guilty in the High Court of Social Media of the crime of… taking a picture of a house, and posting it on Twitter whilst out campaigning in Rochester and Strood on the day of the by-election.

The Spectator summarises:

Emily Thornberry has resigned from the shadow Cabinet for sending a Tweet that appeared to mock a Rochester voter who was flying several St George’s Cross from their window and had a white van parked outside. Thornberry’s resignation follows Miliband aides briefing that the leader was the angriest they’d ever seen him after being told about the tweet. All this shows just how sensitive Labour is to the charge that it is now a party run by a metropolitan elite who have little connection with the party’s traditional working class base.

Let’s step back. The tweet “appeared to mock” the Rochester and Strood resident? Only someone with the psychic ability to read Emily Thornberry’s mind could know whether she intended to mock him or not. A picture of a house and vehicle cannot by themselves constitute mockery, and the terse caption “Image from Rochester” is equally inscrutable. Anyone other than Emily Thornberry claiming to possess full knowledge of the spirit in which the picture was taken and posted is vastly overestimating their journalistic, political or clairvoyance skills.

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The Passion Of Ed Miliband

Samuel Hooper12 Comments

 

This blog has never been Russell Brand’s head cheerleader, but the author of Revolution has come a long way since he stole the show (and the message) from the People’s Assembly March for the Alternative protest against austerity back in June, and once in awhile he says something very perceptive on his YouTube news channel, The Trews (true news).

Sure enough, approximately 1.5 minutes into Brand’s latest Trews dispatch (above) he hits on an important question: why do politicians (and Miliband in particular) spend so much time telling us how “passionate” they are about anything and everything?

Last week, Labour’s ex-leader-in-waiting Ed Miliband went to Senate House in London to make the ninth or tenth relaunch of his rocky tenure as Leader of the Opposition. The partisan crowd assembled, the press corps gathered, and out strode Miliband to bore us again with his passion for changing the country, his sleepless nights spent obsessing about struggling families, and his determination to do away with inequality once and for all. No policy ideas, no detail, no new national goal to capture our collective imaginations and harness our own efforts, but more passion than you could shake a stick at.

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