Labour Party

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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Ed Miliband’s Failure To Relaunch

Samuel Hooper30 Comments

 

This dated, early-colour TV footage of President Lyndon B. Johnson addressing the University of Michigan’s graduating class of 1964 stands as a simple, self-evident example of a great political speech.

It’s necessary to point this out because those of us who came of age under the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, or even more recently in the Lib-Con Coalition years, may well never have heard one in our lifetimes – at least not in contemporary British politics.

2014 marks fifty years since the unveiling of LBJ’s Great Society initiative, in which Johnson unveiled a sweepingly bold and progressive agenda of domestic programmes intended to combat poverty, inequality and racial injustice in America. Only two years previously, the slain president John F. Kennedy had also called upon his country to dedicate itself to a bold new purpose: landing a man on the surface of the moon and returning him safely to Earth, within the decade. Kennedy’s goal – America’s goal – was achieved on 16th July, 1969.

That’s what leaders do. As citizens of modern Western democracies we are more or less capable of handling the day-to-day business of living life – working, raising families, finding meaningful recreation – ourselves, only looking to government to provide or assist with that which ordinary human beings and families cannot do by or for themselves alone. Great, even competent political leaders understand this truth, and devote their energies to setting the big picture, steering the ship of state, even daring and accomplishing mighty things when the occasion arises.

Or at least, that’s what leaders and prospective leaders are supposed to do.

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Chuka Umunna Is Not The Answer To UKIP, Or Labour’s Leadership Crisis

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

Chuka Umunna Labour Party Champagne Socialist 2

 

David Cameron has his fair share of problems, with Nigel Farage’s UKIP nipping at his heels and EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker goading him about Britain’s £1.7 billion EU surcharge. Nick Clegg faces a daily battle to fend off irrelevancy and the implosion of his party. But despite their tribulations, I doubt that either man would volunteer to switch places with the hapless Leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband.

The Spectator sums up Miliband’s woes in their sketch of yesterday’s PMQs:

The Labour leader needed a win today. Badly. His poll ratings have dipped to the same level as Gordon Brown’s in 2010, but at least Brown had the excuse of being in a fag-end administration led by a scowling narcissistic tax-junkie.

Indeed. It’s one thing to have terrible personal ratings when you are an establishment figure associated with a party that has been in power for over a decade, but – wait a second, Ed Miliband was all of those things, and still he was installed as the Labour Party leader. The consolation would be that his personal ratings couldn’t possibly fall much further if he did win power and occupy 10 Downing Street, if only the chances of that happy event were not receding quite so rapidly.

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In Opposing EVEL, Labour Struggles To Defend The Indefensible

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Saltire Downing Street BBC EVEL constitutional reform scotland

 

It’s mighty hard to defend the Labour Party’s current position on devolution and constitutional reform.

Most normal people would not call loudly for a United Kingdom constitutional convention unless they had a brightly shining idea – hell, at least a rough approximation – of what they wanted to come out of it.

And if the concept of EVEL – English Votes for English Laws – is one of those acceptable outcomes, why not simply say so and sidestep all of the criticism now coming their way from the Conservative Party, the media and the general population?

But the Labour Party was silent or dismissive of EVEL during today’s parliamentary debate on the ramifications of the Scottish independence referendum decision precisely because they intend to use a UK constitutional convention (or rather, the distant prospect of one) as a convenient means of burying EVEL forever and maintaining their already heftily unfair electoral advantage in perpetuity.

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