Oh Dear
Philip Collins is a Labour supporter, I would say, as a former speech writer for the Labour leader Tony Blair, but he certainly doesn't pull his punches in this piece for The Times about what is likely to happen if Ed Miliband becomes Prime Minister after next year's general election.
Now I agree with that assessment because Ed Miliband is not exactly the 'new kid on the block' as he's been Labour leader for the past four years, he's had the time and opportunity to make his make and set out what he stands for and how he would tackle the many challenges facing UK PLC.
Yet as things stand his opinion poll ratings in Scotland are worse than those of David Cameron, the Conservative leader and Prime Minister in an Coalition Government that has been forced to make all kinds of unpopular decisions as the country starts to live within its means, balances the spending books and clears up the mountain of public debt.
In other words things are not going to get a whole easier in the next Westminster Parliament and yet Ed Miliband had nothing to say on the subject in his recent big speech to the Labour Party conference, which is unforgivable if you ask me.
Now if Ed had said Labour was going to embark on a different course, that he had a Plan B and here is what Plan B involves, then the Labour leader might have got my attention.
But as things stand I think Philip Collins is right and that Ed Miliband is a looming disaster for the Labour Party and the country at large.
Prepare for a terrible mess if Ed becomes PM
By Philip Collins - The Times
The Labour leader isn’t ready for the dirty work of office but an accident of the electoral system could hand it to him
The landslide of 1906 was a victory, as George Dangerfield famously said, from which the Liberal party never recovered. The same might come to be said of the general election of 2015, irrespective of whoever manages not to lose it.
This week the Labour tribe gathered in Manchester for its final assembly before it hopes to form a government. The sense of trepidation was palpable but whether delegates feared defeat more than victory was, rather like Ed Miliband’s terrible stories about the everyday people, hard to tell.
Governing after 2015 is going to be so horrible that I wouldn’t wish it on my worst political opponents. The coalition’s spending plans detail £8.5 billion of cuts in 2015-16 and a further £37 billion by 2018. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that, if the NHS and schools are protected, then cuts to welfare and local government will be the worst since 1948. If the next government dare not touch pensions then austerity will be even worse.
Labour might try to spread deficit reduction over a longer spell or change the mixture of taxes levied and cuts imposed. However, no matter what Ed Balls, the king of jiggery-pokery, can conjure up, the cuts will be nasty if the deficit is going to be tackled. And it is a very odd sort of progressive politics that is happy spending more every year on debt servicing than on schools.
None of Ed Miliband’s stories about the everyday people of Britain he meets up and down the country conveyed any hint of the problem. The leader’s speech on Tuesday did not even essay an answer to what his shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna called the problem of how to be a social democrat “in a cold climate”. Mr Miliband says he is now sitting an eight-month interview with the nation for the job of first lord of the treasury. In the hour and more he begged of our time, he ignored the critical question of our money.
I cannot for the life of me imagine what he was thinking. Was there a meeting at which Mr Miliband said to his people: “I have a list of subjects here but I think we can only really mention one of them. There’s the deficit, crime, welfare, immigration and an international envoy for transsexuals. Which one shall we go for? I know . . .”
Some of the things he passed over in silence, we now know, were not deliberate. The published transcript of Mr Miliband’s intended words contain meagre and anodyne lines on the deficit. Insistent on his party trick of memorising his text, Mr Miliband forgot them in the excitement of his cheap ovation for a NHS promise he cannot redeem.
That act of forgetting is more telling than any story he did tell. In his next speech Mr Miliband could relate meeting Sigmund one day on Hampstead Heath. “And Sigmund said to me, Ed, he said, I have written a book called The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in which I say that apparently trivial acts of forgetting reveal an unconscious wish of what the speaker really thinks. To forget is almost always to want to forget.”
The truth is that Mr Miliband does not believe the deficit matters all that much. It is inconceivable that he could have forgotten his saccharine section on the NHS or his boilerplate labour market seminar, for they are indispensable to the impression he wanted to leave. The deficit was an afterthought, literally so.
The rhetorical surface of Mr Miliband’s speech was a treatise on authenticity, honesty and levelling with the public. Its tone of voice, though, and its omissions unwritten and unspoken, were an exercise in unconscious deception. The Labour party is not yet mentally prepared for the dirty work it will have to do in office. Its leader, plainly, is not interested in readying them for the battle, preferring instead to take himself and them on a journey to a fantasy land of his own imagining.
The first serious act of the next government will be a spending review, to apportion the pain. There was no need for Mr Miliband to reveal every last item of the zero-based review that his shadow chancellor is conducting. A few illustrations would have done.
He might, for example, have made the left-wing case for deficit reduction by lamenting the nurses unemployed or the schools unopened because of the money wasted on interest payments. Or, rather than hinting that a minimum wage of £8 an hour was the first step on the road to socialism, he might have described it as a welfare cut. By ending the need to subsidise poor wages, Labour will get to grips with in-work welfare. It is the same picture, just looked at landscape rather than portrait.
Mr Miliband does not view the world that way up. He would rather forget about the deficit and talk about something else. Alas, this is not a viable choice because reality keeps forcing its way in. It will not be long after he takes office that Mr Miliband will be on his feet saying that he met a man called François in the Jardin des Tuileries “who said to me, Ed he said, if you are elected under false pretences and caught in possession of world-defying promises, you find that the everyday people of France start hating you the minute that reality smacks them full in the face”.
Labour’s forgotten issue explains why it trails the Conservatives by 25 points on the economy. In a straight fight, Mr Miliband is bested by Mr Cameron. In normal political times this would mean Labour cannot win.
These are not normal times, though. The electoral system is biased in Labour’s favour. The collapse of the Lib Dems and the rise of Ukip means the left has in part united while the right has in part split. Economic recovery is not felt in wage increases. Put all this together and the next election is a prize that nobody can win but somebody has to.
Labour strategists think they can win on a low turnout with a small percentage of the vote, perhaps as low as 35 per cent. This is the victory, perfectly rationally, they are shooting for. They know they can do no better but are convinced they will do no worse. It would be a calumny to their strategic skill to describe it as an accidental victory because it is, down to the last marginal, deliberate.
It is also a recipe for a fearful mess. Defeat in politics is never to be desired but victory can come at a price. There can be no wishing away the brute facts. What Clive James said of Robert Frost is true of Ed Miliband who found it “impossible to memorise what he can never quite forget”. The fractures in British politics may win Mr Miliband a lucky general’s victory but the psychopathology of everyday life will then, alas, get him soon enough.
The Labour leader isn’t ready for the dirty work of office but an accident of the electoral system could hand it to him
The landslide of 1906 was a victory, as George Dangerfield famously said, from which the Liberal party never recovered. The same might come to be said of the general election of 2015, irrespective of whoever manages not to lose it.
This week the Labour tribe gathered in Manchester for its final assembly before it hopes to form a government. The sense of trepidation was palpable but whether delegates feared defeat more than victory was, rather like Ed Miliband’s terrible stories about the everyday people, hard to tell.
Governing after 2015 is going to be so horrible that I wouldn’t wish it on my worst political opponents. The coalition’s spending plans detail £8.5 billion of cuts in 2015-16 and a further £37 billion by 2018. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said that, if the NHS and schools are protected, then cuts to welfare and local government will be the worst since 1948. If the next government dare not touch pensions then austerity will be even worse.
Labour might try to spread deficit reduction over a longer spell or change the mixture of taxes levied and cuts imposed. However, no matter what Ed Balls, the king of jiggery-pokery, can conjure up, the cuts will be nasty if the deficit is going to be tackled. And it is a very odd sort of progressive politics that is happy spending more every year on debt servicing than on schools.
None of Ed Miliband’s stories about the everyday people of Britain he meets up and down the country conveyed any hint of the problem. The leader’s speech on Tuesday did not even essay an answer to what his shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna called the problem of how to be a social democrat “in a cold climate”. Mr Miliband says he is now sitting an eight-month interview with the nation for the job of first lord of the treasury. In the hour and more he begged of our time, he ignored the critical question of our money.
I cannot for the life of me imagine what he was thinking. Was there a meeting at which Mr Miliband said to his people: “I have a list of subjects here but I think we can only really mention one of them. There’s the deficit, crime, welfare, immigration and an international envoy for transsexuals. Which one shall we go for? I know . . .”
Some of the things he passed over in silence, we now know, were not deliberate. The published transcript of Mr Miliband’s intended words contain meagre and anodyne lines on the deficit. Insistent on his party trick of memorising his text, Mr Miliband forgot them in the excitement of his cheap ovation for a NHS promise he cannot redeem.
That act of forgetting is more telling than any story he did tell. In his next speech Mr Miliband could relate meeting Sigmund one day on Hampstead Heath. “And Sigmund said to me, Ed, he said, I have written a book called The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in which I say that apparently trivial acts of forgetting reveal an unconscious wish of what the speaker really thinks. To forget is almost always to want to forget.”
The truth is that Mr Miliband does not believe the deficit matters all that much. It is inconceivable that he could have forgotten his saccharine section on the NHS or his boilerplate labour market seminar, for they are indispensable to the impression he wanted to leave. The deficit was an afterthought, literally so.
The rhetorical surface of Mr Miliband’s speech was a treatise on authenticity, honesty and levelling with the public. Its tone of voice, though, and its omissions unwritten and unspoken, were an exercise in unconscious deception. The Labour party is not yet mentally prepared for the dirty work it will have to do in office. Its leader, plainly, is not interested in readying them for the battle, preferring instead to take himself and them on a journey to a fantasy land of his own imagining.
The first serious act of the next government will be a spending review, to apportion the pain. There was no need for Mr Miliband to reveal every last item of the zero-based review that his shadow chancellor is conducting. A few illustrations would have done.
He might, for example, have made the left-wing case for deficit reduction by lamenting the nurses unemployed or the schools unopened because of the money wasted on interest payments. Or, rather than hinting that a minimum wage of £8 an hour was the first step on the road to socialism, he might have described it as a welfare cut. By ending the need to subsidise poor wages, Labour will get to grips with in-work welfare. It is the same picture, just looked at landscape rather than portrait.
Mr Miliband does not view the world that way up. He would rather forget about the deficit and talk about something else. Alas, this is not a viable choice because reality keeps forcing its way in. It will not be long after he takes office that Mr Miliband will be on his feet saying that he met a man called François in the Jardin des Tuileries “who said to me, Ed he said, if you are elected under false pretences and caught in possession of world-defying promises, you find that the everyday people of France start hating you the minute that reality smacks them full in the face”.
Labour’s forgotten issue explains why it trails the Conservatives by 25 points on the economy. In a straight fight, Mr Miliband is bested by Mr Cameron. In normal political times this would mean Labour cannot win.
These are not normal times, though. The electoral system is biased in Labour’s favour. The collapse of the Lib Dems and the rise of Ukip means the left has in part united while the right has in part split. Economic recovery is not felt in wage increases. Put all this together and the next election is a prize that nobody can win but somebody has to.
Labour strategists think they can win on a low turnout with a small percentage of the vote, perhaps as low as 35 per cent. This is the victory, perfectly rationally, they are shooting for. They know they can do no better but are convinced they will do no worse. It would be a calumny to their strategic skill to describe it as an accidental victory because it is, down to the last marginal, deliberate.
It is also a recipe for a fearful mess. Defeat in politics is never to be desired but victory can come at a price. There can be no wishing away the brute facts. What Clive James said of Robert Frost is true of Ed Miliband who found it “impossible to memorise what he can never quite forget”. The fractures in British politics may win Mr Miliband a lucky general’s victory but the psychopathology of everyday life will then, alas, get him soon enough.
