UK Politics

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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Everyone Is Still Fudging The Truth On Immigration

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

Britain Immigration EU

 

The Telegraph’s Morning Briefing email, produced by Stephen Bush, always provides a good summary  of the day’s political highlights, but today one story in particular stands out. Riffing on the old complaint “They come here, they take our jobs”, Bush cites several articles citing a UCL study which point out that EU migrants actually made a net contribution to the British economy when tax contributions and welfare claims are compared, joking “Coming over here, adding £20bn to our GDP…”

Predictably, the newspapers immediately fall into their partisan groupings to spin the news. From the Morning Briefing summary:

“£120bn cost of Labour’s policy on immigration” is our splash. “UK gains £20bn from EU migrants” sayeth the Guardian. “EU migrants add £2obn to the economy in a decade” cheers the Indy.  A study running by two leading migration experts at UCL has thrown further light on the costs and benefits of migration. Migrants from within the EU contribute £20 billion to the British economy, with immigrants from the original 15 EU countries contributing 64% more to the Exchequer than they took out in services and migrants from eastern Europe added 12% more than they took out.

It would be hard to concoct a sample of headlines and statistics that did more to obfuscate and confuse an important political issue, even if you tried. And that’s no criticism of Morning Briefing – it has faithfully published a representative sample of the UK print media’s coverage of an important political issue.

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British Politics Has Become A Centrist, Ayn Rand-Style Dystopia

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

Westminster train 02

 

Readers of Atlas Shrugged will recall the Taggart Tunnel disaster, a seminal moment in Ayn Rand’s novel. The deadly train accident, an avoidable, man-made calamity, highlights the devastating but inevitable consequence of having too few people of moral fibre, wisdom and intelligence left in positions of power and authority.

For those unfamiliar: in the build-up to the disaster, the Taggart Railroad’s flagship transcontinental service breaks down while passing through Colorado, stranding a trainload of passengers in the mountains. Taggart Transcontinental’s best engineers and executives have long since deserted the company, resigning out of frustration with the endless bureaucratic meddling and the glorification of consensual mediocrity which has taken hold of corporate and political culture in the dying days of the United States. With no replacement diesel locomotives available and with nobody willing to take responsibility or speak truth to power, a self-important politician travelling on the train is able to bully reluctant and inexperienced railroad employees to use a coal-burning engine to pull the train through the long, airless mountain tunnel, resulting in the death by asphyxiation of everyone on board.

The grey characters of modern British politics are far less compelling than those in Ayn Rand’s dystopia, but alarming parallels are starting to appear between the groupthink and instinct for self-preservation shown by  the elite in Atlas Shrugged and the recent behaviour of the Westminster village as it faces the intertwined problems of unfinished constitutional reform, voter apathy, the relentless march of UKIP and an economic recovery that may as well not exist for the low-paid.

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