Tag Archives: milliband

They never learn

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The Team directly responsible for the Iraq War / selling off UK public services to private companies / destroying civil liberties / turning at least a blind eye to torture losing the last election really haven’t got the message have they?

Mandelson and Blair are telling Labour party members – through the privileged medium of the public press – who to vote for in the upcoming election. Well, who not to vote for, anyway. And that is a category that seems to include everyone except David Miliband….. They both regard a potential win by Ed Miliband as a potential electoral disaster.

But then they are such popular chaps, these two – Blair and Mandelson….

Any remarks by Blair will be a mixed blessing for David Miliband: Blair has not been forgiven by many Labour activists for the Iraq war and the involvement of the private sector in public services. From the Guardian

Indeed, all the candidates united in publicly expressing distaste for Mandelson only two months ago.

Former foreign secretary David Miliband, who is believed to be Mandelson’s preferred candidate for the party leadership, described the memoirs as “destructive and self-destructive”.
He compared Mandelson’s appearance in a TV advert for the book to that of Bond villain Enst Blofeld, saying all the former minister, nicknamed the Prince of Darkness, needed was a white cat to stroke.

And he’s Mandelson’s chosen candidate….

I can detect only minimal difference between Millidum and Millidee. A conspiracy theorist might even suggest that Blair & Mandelson’s support for Milliband_A was just a cunning ruse designed to leverage (;-) the mass force of Party members’ anti-Blair&Mandelson revulsion to ensure that Miliband_B was elected.

.. Mandelson said anyone who tried to take Labour back to the era before Blair’s election as leader in 1994 would wreck the party’s chances of a swift return to power. (from the Guardian)

(I didn’t even know that any of the candidates had a time machine. )

This implies that the Labour party that is just power-seeking machine. What is supposed to be the point of seeking power? Pre-Blair Labour supporters might have said something about social justice. The Blairite camp would just snigger at your naivete for even posing the question.
In a video on the Guardian’s website, Diane Abbott talked about the massive contrast in campaign funding between her campaign (a couple of volunteers and a £1000 in the bank) and Miliband_A’s. He, on the other hand, has received over £200,000. Plus the poisoned-chalice free support of the New Labour big guns, of course.

Spot the odd one out: Candidate’s voting records…..
Diane Abbott
David Milliband
Ed Milliband
Ed Balls
Andy Burnham

Mmm. Only one of these candidates hasn’t spent the past few years kissing leadership butt and supporting the sort of policies that have brought the Labour Party into such disrepute among its natural supporters.

There’s one candidate with clean hands. And (simulated surprise) she doesn’t have big money from big business.

As Andy Hamilton said on Have I Got News For You last year (from memory)…

“I can’t be doing with these new metric politicians like the Millibands. I much preferred the old imperial ones like Michael Foot..”

Miliband says “sorry about that”

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The UK Foreign Secretary has admitted The War Against Terror was a “mistake” in today’s Guardian and even accepts that it was counter-productive

(Well, d’uh.)

Much better late than never, as the saying goes. Still, I wonder why any UK ministers failed to notice this glaringly obvious fact until today?

Miliband didn’t say “I, for one, welcome our new saner overlords” but he could have.

Not a beauty contest

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Youth and beauty are really poor reasons for picking world leaders. Lots of people in the real world and on tinterweb point out that Obama is younger and prettier than McCain. Well, no doubt about that. E.g, Things younger than McCain or look at this image on Covert History with obvious implications that Obama is fitter to be president as well as win the swimsuit round.

Ditto, in the UK, which tends to copy the USA, but following the precept that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The homely older Brown is contrasted with the younger better-looking David Miliband.*

I’m certainly all for Obama, although less won-over by the Blairite-careerist-style charm of Miliband. (Am buggered if I can see any significant policy difference between Brown and Milliband. I want Alan Simpson for PM, whether he’s standing or not….) But, is “younger and prettier” really an adequate criterion for picking a leader?

The only justification I can see for this is where a leader is just a front-end. A marketing device, cynically stuck there while the real power gets operated elsewhere.

Who cares about how user-friendly the front-end is, when it comes to politics? Or if we are all happy to pick the prettiest candidates, with the longest political-aristocratic pedigrees, then we’ve only got our own stupidity to blame.

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* No, that’s not the sociologist (“Belgian-born Marxist theoretician Ralph Miliband” a/c Wikipedia)whose books I read as a student. He’s said sociologist’s not-at-all-privileged-by-birth (sarcasm alert) nuLabour offspring. Wikipedia is quite informative on how he got to Oxford.

David Miliband was educated at schools in London, Benton Park School in Leeds and Boston, Massachusetts before being educated at Haverstock Comprehensive School in North London, where he obtained a Grade ‘D’ in Physics A-level, and 3 Grade ‘B’s. Despite these results being lower than the normal entry requirements, via a scheme for children from deprived backgrounds, he was admitted to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he achieved first class honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. (from his Wikipedia entry)

Blimey, how lucky that schemes for “deprived kids” are so broadly defined. I mean you can hardly get more educationally-deprived than being the son of a world-class academic. (w00t, my A level results piss all over his. 😀 In your face, foreign secretary. 😀 But, obviously, I had the good fortune to grow up on a council estate so I didn’t get the benefit of schemes for deprived kids like him…..)

Nor is it his brother Ed who has also overcome the obstacle of his background to get into Brown’s cabinet.

Isn’t democracy great? None of that ancient “hereditary principle” crap, so discredited by the Enlightenment. I mean look at George Bush who won political power on an amazing log-cabin-to-White-House trajectory.