Speechwriting

Gordon Brown Joins The Anti-Corbyn Fray, With Lecture On Electability

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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Labour’s vote-losing ex prime minister offers his thoughts on electability

Since leaving office, Gordon Brown seems to have gotten it into his head that he is an inspiring, motivational speaker with political opinions that people are clamouring to hear.

Watch any of the former prime minister’s recent speeches, and regardless of the venue or topic he acts like he is delivering a TED talk, roaming the stage and sawing the air with his hands as though he were proposing an end to world poverty or recounting the time he founded a global software firm working out of his garage.

Unfortunately, in reality it is just the same, tedious old Gordon Brown whom the voters were so pleased to be rid of back in 2010. But this hasn’t stopped Labour Party chiefs from drafting him to give a speech on electability, the latest desperate attempt to pour water on Jeremy Corbyn’s inferno.

And yesterday, on a stage overlooking the River Thames and the Houses of Parliament, Gordon Brown duly delivered, pacing the platform like a caged animal as he imparted his wisdom to a grateful nation.

The Spectator nods its approval:

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Mhairi Black’s Overrated Maiden Speech

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

 

By most accounts, the SNP’s Mhairi Black – Britain’s youngest MP in several hundred years – gave a great and powerful maiden speech when she finally spoke during the Budget debate this week. And so it was, if you lower the bar for greatness so far that it encompasses earnest, occasionally witty, wide-eyed socialist babble.

Certainly many Labour MPs were enthusiastic, as the Guardian reported approvingly when the speech went viral:

In the anti-austerity speech where Black called herself “the only 20-year-old in the whole of the UK who the chancellor is prepared to help with housing” after the age limit imposed on housing benefit, she also called for a healing of relations with the Labour party.

“I have never been quiet in my assertion that it is the Labour party that left me, not the other way round,” she said in the speech where she also praised the lateLabour grandee Tony Benn. “I reach out a genuine hand of friendship that I can only hope will be taken. Ultimately people are needing a voice, people are needing help. Let’s give them it.”

Several Labour politicians seemed receptive to her call for cooperation. Praise for Black’s speech was tweeted and retweeted by Labour MPs including Tulip Siddiq, Diane Abbott and Sarah Champion, as well as Labour’s Madeleine Jennings, the parliamentary researcher for MP Stephen Kinnock.

This blog disagrees with almost everything that Mhairi Black believes in, but has no personal animosity toward the twenty-year-old parliamentarian. In many ways it is refreshing and long overdue for someone so young to be included in the makeup of parliament, especially at a time when government policy (and state largesse) so overwhelmingly favours older people, with their selfish attitudes and non-means tested benefits. It is only a pity that Mhairi Black doesn’t represent a serious political party but rather a group of zealous, moralising fantasists who would tear up a three hundred year old union in a fit of pique over ten years of Tory Lite rule. But so be it.

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TV Election Debates? Empty-Chair The Lot Of Them

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

 

Behold our political leaders debating whether or not they should participate in televised debates ahead of the general election.

We have wasted an inordinate amount of time over the past two weeks worrying about the general election televisised party leader debates. Countless headlines and front pages have been devoted to the “will they, won’t they” game of brinksmanship being played out by David Cameron and the other party leaders. Ed Miliband wasted the better part of his Prime Minister’s Questions attack on the subject. And for what?

What are we really getting excited about when we feverishly speculate over whether the debates will happen, and which of the identikit politicians will bother to appear on stage? Do we actually expect to hear serious new policy initiatives being announced? An honest discussion about the budget deficit, and competing but realistic spending plans that will bring the public finances back into balance? A searching discussion about twenty-first century Britain’s place in the world?

Has anything happened over the past five years to give us cause to hope for these things? And here’s an even more important question: Why do we care about the debates anyway?

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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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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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