My belated condolences. I always enjoyed reading his posts and will miss his insight and wide ranging views. May hew…
A political party in a death spiral.
The evil that men do lives after them, to quote Shakespeare. Ed Milliband, a rather indifferent British politician of what used to be the mainstream left-wing party, masterminded two disasters. The first was the global warming act and the second was the destruction of the Labour party.
He was right in the modern politician profile, rich family, never worked a day in his the life the proceeds of which would go towards paying the electricity bill which you knew was swooping in towards you and wasn’t going to be negotiable.
The former was to show some sort of virtue signalling to save the world, but just ended up loading green taxes on energy bills which at end of day priced the poor out of the heating your hovel market. They nowadays self-ration or get cut off through winter. It was the worst betrayal of the most vulnerable members of our society.
An absolute bloody disgrace.
The latter was part of a shadowy deal he did with the trades union dinosaurs to become party leader after he’d stabbed his own brother in the back to take the throne. For a mere £3, the price of a drink, you could become a Labour party member which gave you a vote as to who would lead it. In essence, the paid up members of the party would decide who led it, rather than the elected MPs.
After he’d led the Labour party to its worst defeat ever in a general election, and incidentally the worst predicted result by all the pollsters and pundits, he resigned and the leadership contest under the new rules began.
With a certain majesty, the opportunity doors slowly opened invitingly wide to allow the extreme left to take over the Labour party for only three quid a pop. That’s exactly what they did and got someone totally unelectable to head a mainstream party who feels comfortable ignoring a no confidence vote of 170 to 40 by his own elected MPs.
After nearly all of his shadow cabinet resigned en masse, he ploughed on and flung a few scraps of appointments to the politically innocent who leapt at the opportunity like seals being tossed sardines. The only woman of note in the shadow cabinet is one he shagged in the middle of one of his marriages, but while she may be an idiot, she’s also black, so that’s okay.
He’s someone who over a three decades long career as an MP, managed to vote against the Labour party official line on over 500 occasions and is now bemoaning his lack of support from his MPs. His little helpers are now busy out there trying to get any of his critical MPs deselected ahead of the next general election. It’s all vicious, local politics stuff but is largely academic. They are now unelectable.
His supporters openly say it’s more important to be right than to be elected, so given that mindset that’s the end of him and them in any realistic political sense.
They’re currently running yet another Labour leadership race but everyone with two political brain cells to rub together already knows how it’s going to end – the incumbent will be re-elected because the extremists will get their vote out big time. The reaction will be schism, the Marxist fundamentalists owning what was the official Labour party and the sane ones splitting off to form something akin to their traditional founding principles.
It’s a battle for the soul of a party and the extremists are winning it, but in winning the battle they’ll lose the war.
Churchill said words to the effect that if you weren’t left-wing when you were young you didn’t have a heart, and if you weren’t right-wing when you were older you didn’t have a brain. My politics embarked on that journey, though I have to say I’m more about issues rather than stereotype politics. A plague on both your houses.
The concern I have is that with no creditable opposition, a ruling party will always tend to run rough shod over the will of the people.
That’s exactly what it will do.
©Pointman
Related articles by Pointman:
Political fracture points and power vacuums.
The loss of faith in the political class.
UK Election 2015 – The car crash of the chatterati against reality.
Pointman's 
Well, a very good summary of the debacle as usual Pointy.
Only two items to add to it. Firstly it wasn’t only the extreme left that piled in to vote for Corbyn, but also quite a few people from the right of politics who could see that £3 a go would help to saddle the Labour Party with an unelectable leader. How those running Labour could not see the likely outcome, is amazing.
The other piece of daftness was that several Labour MPs who proposed Corbyn didn’t vote for him in the contest. They only proposed him because all the other candidates were identikit “Blairite” numpties and they wanted to make it appear that there was a “wide” spectrum of candidates on offer. He was just expected to be a token lefty nutter. When he won they were appalled.
Your comments about Milipede and the climate change act are totally on the nail, but then Nu Lavatory (the fiscally incontinent) screwed hard working people in nearly everything they did – a false boom fed by borrowing (government and personal), increased stealth taxation, nothing done to control unsustainable mortgage borrowing, driving house prices to levels that many working people cannot afford, even at historically low interest rates. How a party whose headline reason to exist is the protection of the lowest paid came to end with such an outcome is beyond any sense – as you say Pointy – an absolute bloody disgrace.
I see myself as libertarian and express views that some see as left, and other views that some see as right. I think I am in the middle. One of my Great Uncles was on the Labour Party National Council (or whatever it was called then) in the 1920’s and 30’s – what he would make of the current crop of champagne lefties I don’t know. I suspect though that he might at least recognise Corbyn as someone on the left – most Labour MPs he might struggle with.
LikeLike
I am having a few ” problems” reaching your site for previous , either comments or articles, has any one got the same issues? I won’t go into why we cannot comment on any “Major ” news site these days, is that just me or is that across the spectrum as well?
LikeLike
11/7.
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
Dylan Thomas
LikeLike
I followed the same path…from hard left to hard reality. I will never vote for the labour party again, even though I have voted for them in all but the last election.
It was the Climate Change Act that broke me, to make the poor choose between heating and eating is Victorian in the extreme.
LikeLike
It is not just in the UK that the Left? are behaving in a manner that suggests rabies. In Australia there is debate about Gay Marriage, with no one even mentioning anything that would cast any shadow on the march to Political Correctness. There is little doubt that the public would support the introduction, and the Coalition, who by and large aren’t keen on it, are proposing a plebiscite. Labour and The Greens who are rabidly in favour are opposing the plebiscite.
Work that one out. I mention in passing a poll claimed that only 3% of gays wanted to be married or a lot less than 1% of the population, yet both sides seem to think it is the most pressing problem we face. I would suggest that getting some common sense into parliament might be more urgent.
LikeLike
Ed Miliband is not just responsible for the Climate Change Act 2008. As Labour Leader in late 2013 Labours’ main policy proposal was Freeze that Bill, where Labour implied that the rises electricity and gas bills were due to profiteering by the Energy Providers. I looked at the accounts of the big six from 2009 to 2012. Nearly all of the rises in bills were due to increases in fixed costs. The major reasons for rising fixed costs were rapidly rising renewable subsidies (mostly for wind) and the costs of connecting the wind turbines to the National Grid. Basically Miliband was responsible for imposing regressive policies, then blamed big business for the consequences.
LikeLike
Jesus wept.
LikeLike
The concern I have is that with no creditable opposition, a ruling party will always tend to run rough shod over the will of the people.
So, given that since the political assassination of Margaret Thatcher by the Europhiles the “Conservative” party has drifted to the Centre Left, Cameron being a self-proclaimed “Progressive” AKA Socialist,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/22/progressive-tories-david-cameron
the Lib Dems having committed political suicide and the Labour party having resurrected the Militant Tendency – Corbyn’s hard left Momentum stormtroopers are apparently based in Liverpool, funnily enough – and thus rendered themselves unelectable for a generation at least, then it is to be hoped that UKIP under their new leadership can step up to the plate as a genuine Centre Right party..
They have already attracted a great number of true Conservatives and Labour party members, so we must hope that Diane James can quell the in-fighting and pick the low-hanging fruit.
LikeLike