At least it wasn't David
Edward Pearce
There is at least one reason to welcome Ed Miliband's victory: his brother didn't win. David may be both intelligent and rather nice – I remember having fish and chips with him during a Brighton conference pre-97 – but he is by training a follower. He has been cherished, favoured, advanced and made grateful. He is a professional protégé, the candidate of a leader and of the leader's faction. Gratitude would have paralysed him in the future as it did when he voted for the Iraq war, recited its sad rationalisations and, at the FO, followed the Bush line as Blair followed it. He is a man in a conga, a good trooper, not the man to challenge the unrelenting coalition mantra that Labour and Brown are the chief begetters of the deficit, as they are not. Blair deferred to City assumptions. David Miliband deferred to Blair. Since in politics deference is death, one applauds the victory of Not-David.
Comments
David Miliband performed some shameful manouevres to suggest that disclosure of documents would imperil intelligence-sharing with the US. It later emerged that the Foreign Office itself may have been behind the US request to suggest such a consequence, and all for what? To deny British citizens the right to have their torture disclosed.
But, somehow, in a parallel universe, none of this matters, it's time to 'move on', and instead David Miliband pursues the leadership of the Labour Party and nobody thinks to ask him at every turn, about a rather serious matter.
And now we're on to the 'new beginning' thing, though sensibly, nobody dares to use the H-word, and the party that presided over 13 years of implementing (largely) Tory policies, along with joining in two disastrous military campaigns (with no practicable end in sight) marches on, somehow now needing to 'reconnect' with voters, to deliver the good news of their message! In a media landscape where 'courting the left' to become Labour leader is being denounced as if we're witnessing the Second Coming of Mao Zhedong. (Brings to mind the glorious Onion story about an African president courting the black vote.)
On we go to the personality-plane of PMQs, while the unwelcome psychodrama of The Brothers will be newspaper fodder also, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
"How are we to assert the existence of a single world, the indivisible world of all living people, when it is asserted, often by violence, that such a world does not exist?" - Alain Badiou
Hugh Gaitskell
Harold Wilson
Jim Callaghan
Michael Foot
Neil Kinnock
John Smith
Tony Blair
Gordon Brown
Apart from Smith, Foot & Kinnock, none of whom was PM, they're a depressing bunch. The first three were all against nuclear disarmament, which was a cornerstone of the party. The worst of them was Callaghan, who said words to the effect that if he had got through his time as PM without doing anything, without rocking the boat, then he was happy. If anything, having a shitty, shifty leader is a Labour tradition; remember Ramsey MacDonald. It's the rest of the party that's good, not the leadership.
When I worked in Germany, in the 90s, in Hamburg, the country was run by Helmut Kohl, but the city was run by the SDP, the social democrats. The latter were all completely bent, so I really don't know who was worse. In a situation like that, no, it doesn't matter who governs, and yes, I am thankful I don't live in Germany.
Hmmm, apart from Joe, all of us appear to have fled the UK.
"All I was trying to say is that any annointed leaderm left,right or centre,"
There is no left, right or centre here, so narrow is the spectrum of UK mainstream party politics. The only movement is of this spectrum, and for the last 30 years it has zoomed rightwards.
"The structure ofthe illusion and its future. The illusion is not to see that it is the state that constructs the fallacious appearance of a political choice on the basis ofthe malleable material formed by public disorientation. Voting is just the operation of this appearance, which today only configures affects of fear. In short, voting is the fictitious figure of a choice, imposed on an essential disorientation." - Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy
The huge neo-liberal bluff - only capitalism works and bring everybody freedom - has yet to be called.
Arise, ye prisoners of want.
For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!
Away with all your superstitions,
Servile masses, arise, arise!
We'll change henceforth the old tradition,
And spurn the dust to win the prize!
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally,
And the last fight let us face.
The Internationale,
Unites the human race."