Across the pond

While I write the leader of the Labour Party is deciding, Ed Miliband, is deciding who is going to be Shadow Chancellor, Shadow Foreign Secretary,  etc. He can only choose people, whom the party has just elected to be members of the shadow cabinet. He probably knew the result an hour or two before it was announced to the media.

This will be the first test of his leadership.  But the crucial issue, is not so much whether he gets it right first time in allotting the right talent to the right shadow post. After all shadow ministers  do not always get the real job the next time the party takes power.

The crucial challenge is to demonstrate, by the way he distributes the top jobs, that he is capable of forging a united Labour Party.

Despite the fact that in the recent leadership election rather more votes were  cast for his elder brother, David, by Labour MPs and Labour activists. Ed won by a whisker, because he was able to wipe out this deficit, because he got more votes from individual trade unionists, who were also entitled to vote.

Which  to the right wing press is tantamount to gerrymandering. But to anyone who knows the history of the Labour Party, it is the thing that differentiates Labour from the other British parties. It is the party of the workers, the trade unionists, who created it. 

So what the media will be looking out for is whether Ed’s team is capable of winning the support of those who supported his elder brother in the leadership election.

In the leadership election, both brothers said how much they loved each other, and how they would go on doing that whatever the result.

In the event, the front runner, David, lost. And he duly beamed happily to the world’s television audience when the result was announced.

But two days later, after Ed made his main speech as new leader, David was visibly angry, and jumped on the next train back to London, telling the media, he would then decide what to do.

He was angry because Ed attacked the record of the Labour Government of which they had both been a part. And of course he was upset because the job he wanted had been won by his younger brother, who many people felt was not even a potential number two when the leadership campaign started.

As the leadership battle developed it became increasingly clear that the Miliband brothers were  the front runners. This led to a media orgy about sibling rivalry.

Inevitably Ed was cast as the nasty one, who was prepared to murder his own brother, to further his own ends. Although the British electorate, 2010, is not very strong on Bible studies, everyone knows that there was a nasty brother called Cain who murdered his nice brother, called Abel.

Even the serious newspapers joined in. Though they also reported modern psychologists, who opined that most brothers dealt with sibling rivalry, by choosing different areas in which to excel.

The Milibands, who were reared by a political activist father, the Marxist theorist, Ralph Miliband. Both sons were enthused by his views, and both chose a career as political activists.

David, four years  older, made his mark, as the policy making backroom boy for Tony Blair, which won him years later a safe Labour seat. He became even more identified with the ruling Brown/Blair New Labour as Gordon Brown’s Foreign Secretary. When Brown was floundering he made a tentative  bid for the leadership – via a careful article in The Guardian, but when the heat in the kitchen became intense, he ducked the fight and stayed in the cabinet.

If his brother Ed had not stood against him,, he would have won the leadership.

So Ed has been cast as the nasty man, ready to murder his brother.

(Which, and this needs to  be spelt out, he has not done. He has challenged him for the job he wanted, and won in an election.)

And his  brother has kept his options open. He is staying clear of his brother’s shadow cabinet. Which means, if Ed makes a mess of things, he may well be able to return as leader in the fullness of time. He is still in his forties.

Nevertheless the leadership battle was fought with a  meda emphasis which harked back to Cain and Abel, with Ed cast as Cain, the brother who was prepared to kill his won brother to win his ends.

In fact, Cain was the elder brother. He was a crop farmer, more sophisicated and a more important player in the economy, than his brother, Abel, who was a humble shepherd.

So in terms of the Labour Party, it is not surprising that they chose Abel rather than Cain.

Because if we fast forward to the 21st century, our major problems are to do, not with the crop farmers, but with the bankers, who are yet again paying themselves huge bonuses, although they brought the world economy to its knees, and are showing that they still think that they should be paid a zillion times more than school teachers, let alone shepherds.

Cameron, and also Obama, have yet to address the interests of fairness, which both US and UK electorates will ultimately demand.

Neither of them has yet done anything effective to curb the society of greed led by these bankers and their super rich friends.

Cameron has done nothing so far to deal with the excesses of capitalism. No doubt he will join with others in celebrating Thatcher’s 85th. Forgetting that she was the architect of the worst crisis in the history of capitalism, who was only averted because the US and British governments poured in government money to stop the melt down.

That is why we have debt crisis now.