Across the pond

Quite suddenly, in the last few days, David Miliband has become a serious possible contender for the job of leading Labour into the next election. Which according to the pollsters is an election they are likely to lose.

The media coverage has escalated to an astonishing degree, even to me who has spent a lot of his life actually reading the newspapers. Miliband’s article for The Guardian last week, is now deconstructed as a plot by the Blairites of New Labour to overthrow the Brownites.

There is supposed to be a Milibandwagon. But none of the newspapers, working overtime managed to unearth any evidence of that. Most cabinet ministers and most party activists, when telephoned by journalists, warned of the danger of Labour changing its leader.

The Mail on Sunday, however, as I reported in yesterday’s blog, dredged up a Blair memo written nine months ago trashing Brown’s destruction of everything he had done for Britain and the British Labour Party.

The Mail reported that Miliband had had regular telephone conversations with Blair recently. The implication was that Miliband was wanting to overthrow Brown because he was reversing Blairism. The Mail gave no evidence of those conversations, let alone reporting what Blair and Miliband said to each other.

But if you read what Miliband actually said in his Guardian article it was not so much a complaint that Brown was not continuing the Blair path, it was the opposite.

Here is the key quote from The Guardian article.

Every member of the Labour party carries with them a simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few.

Miliband is urging not that Brown be more like Blair. He is urging Labour to remember what it stands for as a politiccal party. His argument against Brown, who had solid Labour roots is not that he is reversing Blair’s policies, but that he is following them.

And Brown, like Blair before him, is totally ignoring the effect of their policies, jointly decided. Their joint rule hugely increased the inequalities of wealth and priviledge. Since Tony Blair came to power in 1997 the personal wealth held by the top 10 per cent of the population has swelled from 47 per cent to 54 per cent. This is a huge increase.

And now Britain, like the US is facing a recession, it is an obscenity for a Labour leader not to make a serious attempt to revserse this trend.

Milband, in his Guardian article, is suggesting Newer Labour needs to address this.

But of course the myth of Blair/Brownism is that Labour can only become electable if it cowtows to the fat cats with their ever increasing salaries. Miliband is challenging that myth.

In doing this he is in a somewhat similar position to Margaret Thatcher, when she ousted Ted Heath as Conservative Party leader. She won, not because of a plot. Although she had some close friends like Sir Keith Joseph and the far right Institute of Economic Affairs, she was essentially going on her own instincts. She refused to believe that Conservatives who embraced the bloody, survival of the fittest, capitalist policies, were unelectable. And she was proved right.

For a few years.

Today, we are faced with a mirror image of the Thatcher era. The notion that Labour is unelectable, unless it allows the greedy to earn huge salaries and get away with not paying tax on them.

Miliband is, maybe, challenging this myth.

I say, maybe, because I have not actually met him.

I cannot be sure that his is challenging what is happening for the right reasons.

But I do know enough to realise that much of the media stuff written about him is tosh.

He got into Oxford, so they say, because of influence. He had two D levels in his A levels.

This says a whole lot about our examination system.

Because it is evident to anyone who has listened to him, or read any of his speeches, that he is far more intelligent than the average.

He was schooled not at Eton, ilke David Cameron, but at Haverstock School, which was supposed to provide a brilliant education for whoever who went there, be they working class Irish immigrants, or sons and daughters of the intellectuals in the neighbourhood.

Since it was in my neighbourhood, I know it well. It was in no sense a bad school, but it was not orchestrated to seeing ‘good’ education as getting the largest percentage into university.

So I am awaiting to see Miliband shapes out. It is obivous to me, that he is vastly more intelligent than the average.

My qualification about him has been that most of what he writes and says is far too cerebal. In the language of the posh folks he met at Oxford.

It is unsurprising that he is cerebal, since his Dad was a noted Marxist philosopher. Not old Labour or new Labour, but someone who had studied Karl Marx and found that some of what he had to say was relevent to the world in which we live now, although Marx died before the Daily Mail’s Northcliffe, and Pulitzer and Hertz in the US had invented the mass media.

So if Miliband does go forward I will be looking at his education policies.

Blair and Brown have been pushing people into Academies dominated by wealthy businessmen. So that they can balance the budget and avoid the unpopular policies af asking for more taxes, from the rich and the not so rich.

Because in the idiot world in which we live, the super rich pay less tax than the middle classes.

According to Toynbee and Walker at least 32 of the UK 54 billionaires paid NO TAX AT ALL.