Saturday, September 25, 2010

Half an hour until Miliband leads Labour

I've just watched a man take a fast red car round the streets of Singapore and plonk it on pole position when 25 minutes earlier it had been almost knackered.

Unfortunately Fernando Alonso isn't in the running to lead the Labour Party, and sorting out that organisation's problems will take a bit more than some fast tweaking by a talented team of mechanics.

It looks like whichever Milibrother has won will have had only a small margin over the other. That wouldn't matter if, as between Clegg & Huhne, there wasn't much between them on policy & strategy but Brother Dave offers a return to Blairite New Labour while Brother Ed offers a return to the 80s. If he wins, his union supporters will want their pound of flesh.

The tensions between those two factions, as we've seen for years, may dominate and paralyse Labour in the years to come.

The new leader will have a shadow cabinet of 19, almost a third of whom may be from 3 families: the Milibrothers, Yvette Cooper & Ed Balls & Harriet Harman as deputy leader & potentially her husband Jack Dromey.

It's all quite exciting - this last 24 hours of speculation that Ed has pipped his brother has been much more exciting than the 5 months of the contest.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:On couch

1 comment:

KelvinKid said...

Ed Miliband is strongly endorsed by Roy Hattersley in today's Observer http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/25/ed-miliband-new-labour-leader-by-roy-hattersley

Hattersley is hardly a raving lefty and neither is Ed Miliband. He has moved swiftly to distance himself from trade union excess and he is not saddled with much of the baggage of NuLabour.

Clegg has recently implied there is no place in the Party for left-wingers and certainly 40% of our vote has already migrated to Labour. The problem for Clegg is that a revived Labour Party under Miliband might start attracting Lib Dem activists with policies that are progressive and moderate.

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