Across the pond

Our Royal Family is so big that Royal Weddings are happening every year or so. This one, however, is a biggie because Prince William is second in line for the top job. So that Kate Middleton stands a chance of becoming Queen while she is still young enough not to be fired as a television presenter. Though that is by no means certain. Prince Charles, now happily married, could well bumble on for another decade or two, disfiguring the landscape with retro old buildings. Another two or three Poundurys, dominated by Tesco supermarkets, who seem to relish old fashioned buildings. And, of course, the Queen, given the wonders of modern science as well as her own toughness, may well live to be 110.

Nevertheless, BBC Television devoted the first half of  the 10 PM television news to the news from Buckingham Palace. And this morning’s newspapers are having a field today. As well they might. Royal Weddings sell newspapers. The Times no doubt is already planning its special supplement.

And it is a welcome bit of good news for the coalition. Not because the British public will be so distracted by the hype that the un-employed will forget that they are un-employed. But because a summer Royal Wedding will give our economy a much needed boost. Tourists will come in their millions. Heads of state will be filling the most expensive rooms at our poshest hotels. Hundreds of new entrepreneurs will be starting new businesses making souvenirs  in all shapes and sizes. Not just mugs and plates, but DVDs and computer games!

Republicans in Britain are still very thin on the ground, with only The Guardian making their case. And then only spasmodically. And even the Republicans have a grudging admiration for the ability of the Palace and its advisers to put on a good show. In 1947, when our present Queen got married, the Royal Family had to be seen buying their wedding outfits within the severe limits of their ration coupons. This time around, they have no such inhibitions. They can use the event to give a boost to British fashion, which is still a world leader.

And, this  time around, the Royals have chosen a real commoner. Prince Philip was not only a Royal himself, he was a second cousin of the Queen. Diana, although she was  advertised as a commoner was in fact the poor relation of one of our most aristocratic families. By contrast Kate Middleton comes from a middle class family on the way up. But she is well schooled in the ways of the elite. She met Prince William at St Andrew’s University, which is not as academically celebrated as Oxbridge, but is a much favoured choice for the children of the elite.

For myself I plan not to be in London on the day. As it happens we are planning a family wedding this summer which will probably be on 23 July in Dorset. I hope the Palace chooses the same date. It will give all our friends an opportunity to get away from the mob in London. And, if the recession is biting, we can let our London flat to a couple of Royalists for the weekend.

Which gets nearer to the truth?

1. Riveting old Coen Brothers movie on Channel Four last night, No Country for Old Men, which is set in Texas, 1980. Two psychopathic killers employed by drug gangs, killing anyone who gets in the way as they try to take recover a suitcase of their money found by a good outlaw character, who is a Vietnam vet. The old man of the title, played by Tommy Lee Jones, finds himself helpless in the face of their gun power. The outlaw makes it to the Mexican border but Jones did not manage to stop them killing his mother-in-law. This morning’s hard news. 13 killed in Mexico border drug gang wars. Not big news in this part of the world where over 5,000 people have been shot recently.

2. The WikiLeaks web site has got hold of nearly 440,000 secret US army secret reports, probably the biggest leak in history. They show, amongst many other things; how US failed to investigate the army reports of abuse, torture, rape and murder by the Iraqui police, how 15,000 civilians died in previously un-reported incidents, the death’s of 66,o081 non-combatants, though the US has always claimed they had no body-count figures. First official US reaction is that there is nothing in the leaks to cause them to censure the people responsible. The only ‘crriminals’ they are chasing are the persons, or persons, who leaked the secret reports.

3. British cuts. The fairest ever, claimed George Osborne in his budget speech, making the rich take the biggest burden. Most unfair, stated the widely respected Institute of Fiscal Studies, backed by their facts and figures, which shows the biggest burden falling on the poorest and not so well off middle classes with kids. More evidence today that even the NHS will have to punish the poorest –  because there are not enough hospital beds to keep in the elderly infirm, and they can no longer  be supported by the Council care services, because Council budgets are being cut by a massive 26 per cent.

Light relief from the financial crisis can be found in the online Daily Mail

They tell readers that, Stephanie Flanders, the ‘ice queen’ of BBC Television financial coverage, was bedded by both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. As the Mail notes they had plenty to talk about, both between the sheets and out of them – all three have the famed Oxford PPE degree.

I have no idea whether they are speaking truth. But fact or fiction it makes an entertaining story. And the only people likely to be shocked by it are a few Daily Mail readers. The affairs are supposed to have taken place way back in the 1990s. Today, as even the Daily Mail acknowledges, Flanders is ‘happily married’ to the journalist, John Arlidge.

From what I remember of him, Arlidge, is not the sort of bloke who would be easily intimidated by Oxford PPEs or Daily Mail gossip writers. He was a much admired student on the City University newspaper diploma in 1990-91. He worked for The Observer for several years and now mostly writes for the Sunday Times and Conde Nast.

The right wing media has had a field day since Ed Miliband announced his new Shadow Cabinet. He has been scorned for giving three top jobs to supporters of elder brother, David. Far from being new generation Labour, the media pundits say, the power has been handed to old faces of New Labour.

The heaviest artillery was targeted at his appointment of Alan Johnson to the key job of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Johnson was the first former Labour cabinet member to come out for David Miliband in the leadership election. He was a super loyalist in the last year or two of the Brown administration, buckling down and doing his job. Refusing to challenge for the leadership himself, or support others who would do.

Not only that he is OLD. He is 60! Old enough to have been Ed’s father.

Better than that, for the big media guns, he does not have any schooling in economics. He even said himself, with wry self-deprecation, that his first move would be to buy himself an economics primer. He could have appointed either Ed Balls, or his wife, Yvette Cooper, both of whom have the famed Oxford PPE degree (Philosphy, Politics and Economics) and some experience of the Treasury.

But it is entirely possible that the Tory press have gravely underestimated Alan Johnson. He was orphaned at 12 brought up in a council flat, left school at 15 to stack shelves at Tesco and then became a postman. But he was an intelligent lad who had got into grammar school. And despite his lack of further education rose to become a trade union leader and then a Labour MP.

Despite his lack of education he was an effective minister, first in the Department of Trade, later as Health and Education Secretary and finally as Home Secretary. In each of these jobs he demonstrated that he could master a brief, despite his lack of formal education.

He has shown himself to be a very quick learner. And there is no reason why he should not master the Chancellor’s brief. Particularly so, because the Treasury Number Two, Angela Eagle does have the famed Oxford PPE degree and some ministerial experience at Work and Pensions.

It gets better than that. Because across the floor of the House of Commons he will be facing George Osborne, who has frequently been an embarassment to David Cameron. Because of his ignorance of economics (he read History at Oxford). And because he is of aristocratic Irish stock and frequently seems quite out of touch with the lower orders. So much so that he would not have survived had he not had the Liberal Democrat, Danny Alexander, as his number two. (and guess what Danny is yet another Oxford PPE). As is, of course, Ed Miliband himself.

The spending review of 20 October is going to usher in the cuts which are going to hit the poor, many of whom are the bedrock of Labour voters.

The Labour front bench Treasury team are an ideal pair to  speak to them and for them. (Eagle, though she got to Oxford is the daughter of a working class print worker.)

Along the same lines, it is important that this Labour cabinet is very strong on women, and very strong on equality and fairness, with Harriet Harman taking the deputy leader’s post, as well as the International Development department.

This is a big change from the New Labour of Blair and Brown. And a serious threat to the ConLab coalition cabinet, where Theresa May is bravely trying to get a word in on this cabinet of the boys.

Miliband is the least experienced politician ever to have been made party leader in my lifetime. He has only been an MP for five years. He may fall flat on his face.

But sometimes, the man, or woman, grows to match the job.

Interesting times ahead.

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.

The mainstream press has been distinctly kind to David Cameron about events in Birmingham this week. Unsurprisingly, because the mainstream press is mostly right-wing. But even the leftish Guardian and the mostly neutrel  BBC have failed to spell out just how much he is stumbling. There was, of course, no revolt at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. The party faithful dutifully applauded.

But this should have been a triumphal conference. The first the Conservatives have had as the ruling party since 1997. But it began badly. The curtain raiser to the conference, was the news that the Government was going to remove child benefits to families where the main earner was taking home more than 44 grand a year.

Henceforth this lot would get no subsidy from the tax-payer. This was trumpeted to the world’s media, to demonstrate that our new coalition government was going to make sure that the burden of the cuts would be fairly shared. That the rich would be suffering as well as the poor, who will be hit when the actual cuts are revealed on 20 October. Those cuts are widely expected to fall mostly on the public sector and are likely to result in lots of people earning not very much being thrown out of work. The child benefit move was meant to show that this government was determined to be fair in asking all of us to share the pain.

But the Conservative Party faithful did not like it. Some of them were reluctant to lose their own child benefits. But the hostility to the move was because it was seen to be unfair. Loyal traditional Conservatives would lose out immediately. But families where the mother worked as well could still claim their child benefits even if they were together earning 83 grand.

So this was a measure that was unfair to those many Conservatives who believe that wifey should stay at home and look after the kids, leaving the male to do the bread-winning.

Cameron managed to win some of them over by promising favourable treatment for married couples. But his call for everyone to support his Big Society fell like a damp squib.

As well it might.

He stirred his troops with the battle cry of Lord Kitchener, ‘Your country needs you.’, which urged all British men to enlist to fight the Kaiser in the first world war. Millions responded to that call. And millions of them died as a result, partly because of the incompetence of many of their Generals.

Cameron might have seemed more in touch with our present reality if he had drawn on Jack Kennedy 1963 instead of Kitchener 1914.

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

But he  did not. 

He said that his Big Society was

an attempt to create a country based not on Labour’s selfish individualism but one based on mutual responsibility

Were the Labour still led by Tony Blair this statement  had some possible justification. But given the present reality, where the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, won by a whisker thanks to the votes of individual trade unionists. Not trade union  bosses. But individuals all over the land who credo is ‘mutual responsibity’ , taking care of their weak colleagues as well as their strong colleagues.

This was an astonishingly bad speech for a ruling Prime Minister.

And it makes one wonder about whether Cameron is the mirror image of Blair. An able and decent bloke who happened to get into the wrong party. Blair joined Labour (according to his old friend, Robert Harris, because he was canvassed by the delectable Cherie, who canvassed him on the doorstep, and whom he immediately fancied.

Unlike Blair, Cameron became a Conservative because of admiration of Benjamin Disraeli and Harold Macmillan, not because of any young woman he might have fancied.

But would Disraeli or Macmillan, were they alive today, have wanted to join the Tory faithfuls in Birmingham.

I doubt it.

David Miliband has to decide in two days whether to join his brother in the shadow cabinet – and in the next Labour government, whenever tat is – in two days.

The mainstream press has been having a field day, giving the Cain and Abel story yet another airing.

But the reality of 2010 is that these are two brothers who have been very close and fond of each other. Both of them have to decide what to do – not in the age of Cain and Abel – but in 2010, when both of them are being harrassed at the Labour Party conference in Manchester, by journalists and photographers, to tell us what they are going to do.

This is a nightmare for both brothers.

Ed has to make a speech tomorrow, trying to unify the Labour Party.

Meanwhile the mainstream press is telling everyone that he is thinking of offering David the job of Shadow Chancellor.

For which he is terribly ill-suited.

He has been a good Foreign Secretary. But he knows far less of economics than his brother.

The media has its own axe to grind. And Times Online is leading with a story about a poll, which shows that most Labour voters wanted David.

Maybe.

But what is certain is that Britain’s most powerful media tycoon would have preferred David. Rupert Murdoch who won it for Blair, wants Newer Labour to be like the New Labour of Blair.

Instead of something different.

So if David decides to join the Shadow Cabinet, the Murdoch press will lead the media pack seeking to highlight any differences between them.

But if he declines, the Murdoch press will lead the media pack in implying that Labour chose the WRONG brother.

The best solution would be for David to continue as Foreign Secretary. But the norm in British politics moots for a change.

If that norm rules, far better that David goes for something like Home Secretary.

In the hot-house atmosphere of the Labour conference, or any conference, it is unlikely that reason will prevail.

But we can always hope.

The un-expected sometimes happens.

Predictably the right wing press has had a field day in painting the Labour party’s new leader, as Red Ed. Basing their analysis on the fact that Ed defeated his brother on the fourth vote because he had more of the trade unionists’ vote.

Less predictably the BBC, our public service broadcaster which of often castigated as being left wing, and The Guardian/Observer, which is our only well funded left of centre media group, mostly went along with this scenario.

Forgetting that the trade unions are not limited liability companies with bosses appointed by the shareholders and paid millions more than in the days of Arthur Scargill and Hugh Scanlon and Jack Jones, in the 1960s and the 1970s when the trade union bosses were courted as avidly by the then Conservative leader, Edward Heath, as by Harold Wilson. The trade union bosses are elected by their members and cannot stay in office unless they continue to have the support of their members.

The mainstream press talks to the union leaders, including Derek Simpson, who as head of Unite, ran a very effective campaign supporting Ed.

But the votes which won Ed the leadership, were cast not by the trade union bosses, but by the members. No-one knows which unions the people who supported Ed, as compared with the many trade unionists who voted for the other candidates, including his brother.

But only a small percentage of trade unionists voted.

Who they were and why they voted that way, no-one knows.

But the assumption of the mainstream press is that they are blue collar workers led by trade union bosses.

But it is equally likely that they were white collar workers, some of them in not very well paid public sector jobs. Others highly paid engineers, etc., who happen to believe in trade unionism.

Which means working, with colleagues to influence what happens in whatever organisation employs you.

Ed Miliband won because, alone amongst the candidates, he remembered the historic links between Labour and the trade unionists. He risked the wrath of the Daily Mail.

Today’s Daily Mail online is front paging with:

An open door to benefit tourists: EU warns Britain it can’t stop thousands more migrants claiming welfare handouts

The only mention of the Labour leadership battle is in a column by their favourite red-bashing colunmnist, Richard Littlejohn, with a a hatched job alleging that Ed did not sign his child’s birth certificate. In the course of which Littlejohn harasses Ed for not being married.

He lives with a partner!!!

A woman not his wife.

Sadly, for the Daily Mail, this is not such a great scandal in 2010. If only Ed had had a male partner, the Daily Mail would have been able to frontpage on that.

Instead of leading with yet another story pandering to working class, and middle class, fears about foreigners.

In his acceptance speech at the Labour Party Conference in Manchester this afternoon, Ed Miliband, said that when he  joined the Labour Party, aged 17 in 1987:

Never in my wildest imagination did I believe that I would lead this party.

He was speaking truth, as politicans sometimes do.

But, as politicians rarely do, he was understating his totally amazingly rapid rise to the top job in what the opinion polls think is Britain’s most currently popular politcial party.

Though I have never met him – and so am not privy to his dreams - I can only conjecture that as recently as 2005, he would never in his wildest dreams then, have expected to become leader.

Because that is when he entered serious party politics. And had to fight a tough battle to get  the Labour nomination for the North Doncaster seat.

2005 is only five years ago. But the mainstream press, who were already speculating on who would lead the Labour Party after Blair, never mentioned him, quite rigthtly. He was a minor player, lucky to get in as an MP, helped by Downing Street support, where his elder brother was one of Blair’s most trusted aides as head of the Downing Street policy unit.

The rapidity of his rise is unprecedented in British political history.

This needs spelling out loudly and clearly because, in our world of instant news, the mainstream press in the last few weeks has been predicting that the Ed Miliband might beat his own brother to the job, even though David’s credentials are so superior.

David became the third youngest Foreign Secretary aged 41, and has done the job extremely well. He has huge experience of government and credibility with world leaders. But like Anthony Eden, who became Foreign Secretary at 37, he did not get the top job he deserved until too late.

Churchill, though he was far too  old and drinking far too much, insisted on carrying on as PM. So  Eden was kept waiting and waiting and waiting. He was 58 when he finally became PM. Not very old in today’s terms. But whatever the reason he for it, he was a disastrous PM, although he had been a very good Foreign Secretary.

Eden was too loyal to kick Winston out, while he was still alive. And David Miliband was too loyal to kick out Gordon Brown, before he was ready to go, although he had a half-hearted attempt at it, via an article in The Guardian.

But he did not take it to the voters.

And he did not share Churchill’s gift of being able to speak to the people.

Ed Miliband is better at speaking, from the heart to the people, than his brother, who is (as readers of this blogg will know from my post of his visit to my local Labour Party group) is not strong.

He is unproven in running a major department (as Thatcher was), let alone running the cabinet and a government. He won by a whisker, but the policy differences between him and his rivals, were very slight.

Unlike Denis Healey versus Michael Foot, so his task of uniting the Labour Party is not that difficult. And, unlike Tony Blair, he does not have to deal with a disgruntled Gordon Brown, he has to deal with his own brother, who had such a beaming smile as  he entered the conference hall today, knowing the result, that I thought he had won.

The pundits on the BBC programme I was watching discussed it. Obviously he was faking. Ed, by contrast was somber, and Ed Balls’ face showed that he knew he was a loser.

But maybe, just maybe, David’s smile was genuine.

He is after all  the elder brother, who was still there in the playground when Ed arrived at our local neighbourhood comprehensive, Haverstock School. When Ed probably had to protect him from the yobos in the playground. (Intellectuals of any political persuasion are not popular in the playground. And the Milibands was  nothing if not intellectual, even when they were in short trousers.)

The other amazing thing about today’s result is that Britain is again going to have an option to choose to elect the second Jewish Prime Minister in history.

Disreali, in fact, was a Jew who had become a Christian. Not sure what Ed is, but David has come out as a ‘secular Jew’.

So maybe  we have a possible Prime Minister who is prepared to admit he does not go to church. And a Prime Minister who would greet the Pope courteously.

But not go to Birmingham, thereby acknowledging the Pope’s pretensions to be regarded as a head of state.

And, maybe, just maybe, we might have a  Prime Minister who does not believe that trade unions, 2010, are run by a lot of power mad bosses schooled by Arthur Scargill.

Ed won this election, with the decl9ared support of the leadership of six trade unions, more than any other singly candidate. But all candidates were supported by some trade unions.

But the voting was done, not by the trade union block vote, but by individual members.

Enough  for tonight. But much more to be said  on these issues.

Pope Benedict XIV is a decent human being. There is much to agree with in what he has said about the major problems facing the world in which we live in the llast few days. He deserves a gold star for focussing on human fallibility. 

Individual human beings often get it terribly wrong, however clever they are.

The Pope, of course, is no exception. He is quite wrong in his suggestion that Britain is in the grip of ‘aggressive secularism’. Richard Dawkins deserves that label, and in some of his latest pronouncments his tone is as strident and doctrinaire as the religious fundamentalists. But nearly all the other leading secularists use patient argument, and are all too ready to admit that there is still a lot we have not discovered about the creation of the world and just how the human mind works. Even Stephen Hawkins is much more tentative, even though he has now come to believe from his only speciality that the creation of the world probably happened without the guidance of a God-like figure.

Over-whelmingly the media coverage, on television, in the newspapers, and on the radio, has been sympathetic.

Benedict’s problem is that, now  he is Pope, he has an impossible job description. He is supposed to be ‘infallible’. Not to debate and discuss with other gifted human beings, including scientists researching in relenant areas. But to take advantage of being the only human being with a direct line to God. So when he is deciding what to do his aides protect him from all human contact. He goes alone in the garden to talk  to God.

God does not reply, as he allegedly did with Moses, by writing down  his instructions on tablets. He somehow gets the right thoughts into his mind. That is what Benedict and many other religious leaders believe. But there is no evidence to prove that their beliefs are  not delusions, to which all human beings are subject, however much they meditate.

And, of course, when the Pope castigates our celebrity culture, he does  not deal with the fact that he is right up there at the top of the Premier League. Thanks to his army of spin doctors he gets more front page treatment than any of the dolly birds or the footballers.

And this supposedly secular country gave him the full treatment. He was welcomed in Scotland  by the Queen and the Duke, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the deputy prime minister. He was welcomed to London by a gaggle of ex-Prime Ministers.

And David Cameron himself took the trouble to go to Birmingham airport to give him a rousing send off.

So this very fallible human blogger does not think the country is at risk from agreesive secularists.

On the contrary. For the past week the whole country has been in the grip of Popeomania.

Thank God (if he exists) that he is now safely out of the country. And the media can get back to telling us what is happening to the Labour Party leadership and how much Andy Coulson really knew about phone tapping.