Not really, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Labour is going to have to keep sucking up to JK Rowling though. A measly million won’t clear Labour’s debts – it’ll barely cover Hazel Blears’ handbag habit.
But the remaining rank and file at conference and in the constituencies are chuffed and the press has their juicy weekend nugget of politics, cash and celebrity, so everybody’s happy.
I’m loth to post yet again that hurrah, Gordon Brown’s demise may finally be imminent, because yet again it probably isn’t.
For all that backbenchers, junior ministers and whips alike are coming out of the woodwork, I’ll believe Gordon’s gone when I actually see it. Labours MPs are more like their current leader than they think; they bottle it, just like he does. The bottled on kicking out Blair, who essentially went at a time of his own choosing, and they’ve bottled this too and more than once.
The Labour backbench rebellion reminds me of nothing so much as a rackety old car; everybody’s taking a turn at the handle but the engine resolutely refuses to catch. Kicking it might help.
FFS, someone stick the knife in already. If disaffected teenagers can do it why can’t Labour?
The British weekend papers are full (yet again) of speculation and hot air about how dreadful that Gordon Brown is and how entirely useless; all are agreed, everyone hates him and he should go – but they’re also agreed that his MPs are all all too bloody scared, too frit or too attached to their pensions, salaries and mortgage support to actually do anything so honourable as to rid the country of such an obviously festering boil.
How long has this been going on now? But there is a theoretical way out that would let any frightened internal assassin off the hook and end this impasse. Not that I think any Labour MP should be let off the hook for anything – this is purely in the interests of expediency.
However it would mean talking to the Opposition and preparing to lose one’s job:
There’s more than one way of suppressing dissent… Spyblog, on the evisceration by spin of the Home Affairs Select Committee report on the surveillance society:
What actual use to the public, are Select Committees of the House of Commons, and the Reports which they publish ?
The Labour Government invariably cherry picks a quotation from the summary of such a Report, especially if it was written by a Labour Chairman of the Committee e.g. Government Response to the Home Affairs Committee: A Surveillance Society? (.pdf) leaped on the phrase ,
We reject crude characterisations of our society as a surveillance society in which all collection and means of collecting information about citizens are networked and centralised in the service of the state.
This allowed the Government to claim:
The Government welcomes the committee’s rejection of the characterisation that we live in a surveillance society where the state is engaged in a centralised network of collecting and analysing information on the individual.
Anyone actually reading though the detail of the Report, will see that it actually supports the premise that the UK is already a Surveillance Society.
Who is David Miliband? Why all this hoohah?
Once you get over the resemblance of The Right Honourable David Wright Miliband MP to Star Trek’s Commander Data he would on the face of it appear to have all the necessary qualities to be a model New Labour leader, not least because of the blood he has on his hands; he voted very strongly for the Iraq war and he voted strongly against investigating the Iraq war, despite his later protestations of ambivalence.
He comes from a legacy Labour family. He (and his brother, also in the Labour government) has never had a real job – Daddy the connected historian’s friends saw to that, despite his own avowed Marxism. Some are more equal than others, as was demonstrated by young Dave’s place at Corpus Christi (despite his mediocre A levels) and his fortuitous Kennedy scholarship.
Miliband went straight from Oxford into a thinktank, to becoming a well paid special adviser, to being parachuted into Parliament via a rotten borough safe seat. You see? Perfect. He’s our very own real life Pitt The Very Very Younger.
But this Minister of The Crown, responsible for foreign policy, didn’t even know until corrected by a civil servant that the government whose interests he represents abroad had given a knighthood to Sir Robert Mugabe. See for yourself on BBC’s Question Time:
(Mind you, former Tory minister Douglas Hurd hardly comes off much better, but he is ancient).
Want more? To show how unqualified Miliband is, when he got the job he had to ask the public for advice he’s so bereft of knowledge and ideas.
Today we learn that despite Miliband’s myriad public assurances, the UK has been proved complicit in the dissapearance and torture of people to Diego Garcia. He was duped, he says:
Miliband ‘duped by US’ on rendition
24 minutes ago
David Miliband is facing fresh claims that the US imprisoned terror suspects on British territory.
Campaigners said the Foreign Secretary allowed himself to be “duped by the US on a colossal scale” following new claims of interrogation on Diego Garcia, a UK-controlled island in the Indian Ocean.
A former senior American official told Time magazine that in 2002 and possibly 2003, the US imprisoned and interrogated at least one terrorist suspect on the island.
Mr Miliband has repeatedly denied claims the US has detained terror suspects on British territory.
But the anonymous source, described as a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings, told Time a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said “high-value prisoners” had been held and questioned on the island.
The official also claimed the US may have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia’s territorial waters.
Duped my ass. He’s the foreign secretary – how could he not know?
There are other, lesser but still telling details – his use of an inheritance loophole to reduce the tax on his father’s estate is one, he and his wife’s controversial adoption of babies from the US is another:
And yet, somewhere here lie a few questions that may deserve to be raised. As Foreign Secretary, for instance, was it right for Mr Miliband to place his private life ahead of his public role in such a high-profile visitation? Would he have delayed the transatlantic trip by just a couple of days had the guest been the head of a less translucently repugnant regime than Saudi Arabia’s? Was he, in other words, using Jacob’s arrival as an excuse to avoid greasing the wheels of arms trading of a kind he might once, in the mythic New Labour era of “ethical foreign policy”, have openly described as stomach-turningly hypocritical?
If so, Mr Miliband sets himself a challenging precedent. Every time one of the world’s unlovelier tyrants pops along, he will have to arrange another adoption. Admittedly this is easier in the US, where babies can be picked up by citizens almost as easily as an automatic rifle from WalMart. Even so, should Assad of Syria reprise his 2002 jaunt, Mr Miliband will need to return to the States to add Abraham (I just love his commitment to the tripartite Jewish patriarchy; those shared values with the Saudis yet again!) to Isaac and Jacob.
He’s “very flattered” to be a gay icon. His blog, mainly devoted to the glories of you guessed it, David Miliband, costs the taxpayers 40K a year. That’s about 50p per visitor. (For contrast this blog’s costs are pretty much nil.)
This is not a man with an overdeveloped sense of modesty. Miliband is New Labour made flesh – well-off, overentitled, underqualified, utterly blind to his own hypocrisy. He’s another who’s convinced himself that his personal ambition is actually zeal for the public good and not just a lust for power for it’s own sake.
But now this glorified work-experience boy, not content with having been promoted way, way above his level of competence, has got the gall to think he can walk into No.10 as PM, as if the imposition of the unelected and useless Gordon Brown wasn’t bad enough already.
The reading public’s uniformly derisive reaction to this notion can be seen in the comments to his flag-planting article in the Guardian this week; the nation, or at least the Guardian reading bits, are as one on Miliband. A representative sample:
alisdaircameron
Jul 29 08, 9:53pm
Davey-wavey, you’re wrong (again).
New Labour doesn’t need to make its case afresh, or present its policies in a new light, with new packaging and sales pitch.
The public actually know your case and your policies perfectly and only too well, and utterly dislike them and your whole apparatus and outlook which fatally combine arrogance, incompetence, authoritarianism and a failure to grasp what goes on in ordinary, real people’s lives.
We’ve listened to your case ad nauseam and understand it, better than you do, and can see it for the tommy-rot it is. Have you listened? No, and no number of rigged ‘consultations’ will change this, as you are all too convinced of your rightness to realise what a catastrophic course you have plotted.
None of your party apparatchiks have done real work, but simply continued your student politics into a career, inflicting your shallow glibs idea experiments on the populace to disastrous effect, and all you can say is 2We are right, the experiment will work this time. It must, because we’re so clver”.
I’m sorry, “the project” has failed, and as it’s run its course it destroyed a once-noble party and completely betrayed all the masses who wanted something other than rehashed Thatcherism. You’ve screwed centre and centre-left politics in the UK for decades.
Go NOW, and thank your lucky stars that there aren’t (yet) baying mobs to string you up from lamp posts.
Quite.
There’s only one thing the nation has to say to Miliband – DO NOT WANT.
