Ed Milliband - just another cuckoo in the nest?

[TonyGosling]

Rather than savaging the wobbling Tories Ed has decided to turn on his own party. Strange fellah. Makes you wonder where his loyalties lie.

Miliband 'picks fight with party' by trying to scrap shadow cabinet elections
Craig Woodhouse, Political Reporter - 24 Jun 2011
Ed Miliband faced a backlash today after announcing plans to scrap elections to his top team.
The Labour leader was accused of picking a fight with his party by seeking to take sole control over who is in the shadow cabinet.
Backbenchers warned that he would face opposition to the move while a shadow minister criticised the "cackhanded" way it had been handled.
Senior Labour sources said Mr Miliband was determined to end the inward-looking process and focus on appealing to voters. But one backbencher suggested it was a way to keep ambitious colleagues in line as they hoped to "find favour".
Hayes and Harlington MP John McDonnell launched a scathing attack and said it was "replacing democracy with patronage as we did under Blair"....
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23963963-ed-miliband-se eks-to-stamp-authority-on-labour-party-by-axing-shadow-cabinet-electio ns.do

[TonyGosling]

Labour 'lost touch' with the public - Miliband or
Milliband 'lost touch' with the public - Labour
http://www.channel4.com/news/labour-lost-touch-with-the-public-miliban d

Dead-Head-Ed Miliband's kamikaze mission is going well
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2006154/Poll-puts-Lib-Dems-14- year-low-Ed-Miliband-unpopular-Nick-Clegg.html
The leaders of all three major political parties received bad news today after a poll revealed they are each unpopular with voters.
Neither Labour's Ed Miliband, Lib Dem Nick Clegg nor Tory David Cameron achieved a positive rating.
Mr Miliband scores lowest, at minus 21, followed by Mr Clegg at -20 and Mr Cameron at -5

[TonyGosling]

Milliband's Masonic signs flashing out for his brothers to smile along to


http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2011/12/29/counsel-of-despair-miliband- offers-gloomy-new-year-s-message
'Counsel of despair': Miliband offers gloomy new year's message

Miliband: "I believe this country needs profound change, not small change".
An impenetrable speech and depressing poll ratings leave Miliband in a worse place than where he started.
The 'new bargain' has given Ed Miliband a heading for his blank sheet of paper. But the details still need to be filled in.
Thursday, 29 December 2011 11:54 AM
By Ian Dunt


Link


Ed Miliband has called for "profound change" in Britain to stop the slide into "despair", in a decidedly gloomy new year's message.
The Labour leader argued for "responsible capitalism" to prevent the country going further in "the wrong direction".
Criticising the coalition government, he said: "Having failed in their promise to make Britain a safe haven, they now say that there is no alternative to rising joblessness and years of falling living standards for working people. It is a counsel of despair.
"To address these challenges we need a more responsible capitalism, a new approach to our economy and our society."
The opposition leader promised a vigorous political response from Labour in the new year, as he seeks to dispel questions around his leadership.

[conspiracy analyst]

A topic that will never be breached by Labour Party leaders, taking into account we had Dr Kelly and Robin Cook...

Hugo Chávez hints at US cancer plot

Venezuelan president suggests spate of cancer among leftwing South
American leaders may be inflicted by US technology

Tom Phillips
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 December 2011 13.37 GMT


Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez
Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez suggested that a US plot may be
behind a spate of cancer among leftwing South American leaders.
Photograph: Reuters

He has called George W Bush the devil and described Barack Obama as a
clown.

But Hugo Chávez's customary jabs at his neighbours to the north took
an unusual turn this week, when the Venezuelan president suggested
that Washington might be behind a wave of cancer among Latin American
heads of state.

"Would it be so strange that they've invented the technology to spread
cancer and we won't know about it for 50 years?" Chávez pondered, one
day after Argentina's president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
announced she had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer and would undergo
surgery in January.

Speaking on Wednesday during an end-of-year address to the armed
forces, Chávez hinted that a spate of cancer among the region's
leaders could be a US plot – although he conceded he had no proof and
did not want to make "reckless" accusations.

"I repeat: I am not accusing anyone. I am simply taking advantage of
my freedom to reflect and air my opinions faced with some very strange
and hard to explain goings-on," he said at the event, broadcast live
on state television.

Recent years have seen a series of leftwing Latin America leaders
diagnosed with cancer including Brazil's current president, Dilma
Rousseff, Paraguay's Fernando Lugo, and the former Brazilian leader
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

In late June Chávez admitted he was also being treated for cancer,
telling Venezuelans that doctors had removed "cancerous cells" from
his body.

"I don't know but … it is very odd than we have seen Lugo affected by
cancer, Dilma when she was [presidential] candidate, me, going into an
election year, not long ago Lula and now Cristina," Chávez said this
week.

"It is very hard to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what
has been happening to some leaders in Latin America. It's at the very
least strange, very strange," the Venezuelan president said, according
to government radio Radio Nacional de Venezuela.

Despite his lack of evidence Chávez hinted that other Latin American
leaders should watch out – and recalled how US doctors could have
infected 2,500 Guatemalans with STDs during the 1940s.

"Evo take care of yourself. Correa, be careful. We just don't know,"
he said, referring to Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo
Morales, and Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador.

Chávez said he had received words of warning from Cuba's former leader
Fidel Castro, reputedly the target of dozens of failed and often
bizarre assassination plots including a fungus-infected diving suit
and an exploding cigar.

"Fidel always told me, 'Chávez take care. These people have developed
technology. You are very careless. Take care what you eat, what they
give you to eat … a little needle and they inject you with I don't
know what,'" he said.

While Venezuela's economy remains closely bound to the United States –
the South American country exports more than 800,000 barrels of oil
there each day – Chávez's colourful attacks on the Washington have
been a regular fixture of his presidency.

Apart from the regular insults hurled at its leaders, Chávez has also
accused the US of plotting to invade his country and involvement in a
2002 coup attempt that briefly toppled him from power.

In July this year Evo Morales floated a conspiracy theory of his own,
suggesting the CIA might deliberately plant drugs on Bolivia's
presidential plane in order to discredit his government.

"Do you know what? I think they have to be preparing something," he
said. "So much [so] that I'm afraid to go with our airplane to the
United States.

[TonyGosling]

It is Ed Miliband who is mistaken over public sector strikes
In attempting to appear 'moderate' by calling industrial action 'a mistake' at TUC, Miliband has misread the public mood
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/14/ed-miliband-public -sector-strikes-tuc

Neil Clark - guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 September 2011 14.00 BST

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness, wrote the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Caution in politics can be pretty damn fatal too.

We saw a classic example of this phenomenon with Ed Miliband's failure to support public sector strike action at this week's TUC conference. The Labour leader believes this summer's strikes by teachers and civil servants were a "mistake" and the further action announced by unions on Wednesday should not take place while negotiations are ongoing. Sorry, Ed, but the mistake is yours. Instead of standing 100% behind the hardworking public sector workers whose living standards are threatened due to a crisis in the public finances brought about by the greed of a tiny financial elite, Miliband prefers to keep on the right side of those who would like us to believe that workers withdrawing their labour is one of the seven deadly sins. Interestingly, the free marketeers who routinely lambast trade unions as "wreckers" for standing up for their members' interests are the same people who warn us that unless the 50% top rate of income tax is abolished there will be an exodus of wealth creators from our shores. For neoliberals, the rich holding the country to economic ransom is fine, but when trade unions try to assert their power on behalf of their members, it is completely beyond the pale.

In failing to back public sector strikes, Miliband won't be the first Labour leader to be more concerned about appearing "responsible", than with standing up for the people his party was formed to represent. During the 1984 miners' strike – an important turning point in British post-war history, Neil Kinnock failed to give the industrial action his unequivocal support, leading to later claims of betrayal by the miners' leader Arthur Scargill. Kinnock clearly felt that he had to appear "moderate" to boost his party's chances of returning to power at the next election. In fact, in 1987 Labour only gained 20 seats from its 1983 total. It's a lesson from history that Miliband would do well to heed. Having shown commendable bravery in calling for the Murdoch media empire to be broken up earlier this summer, the Labour leader has, it seems, to use a football term, reverted to playing five across the back. But his belief that appearing "moderate" and playing it safe will be enough to return Labour to power is based on a serious misjudgment of the public mood. Neoliberal capitalism never been so discredited, or so unpopular. We're at a stage when even Charles Moore, arch-Tory and the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, is asking "is the Left right after all?". Millions of people, not just traditional Labourites, but "middle Englanders" frightened of the coalition's free market reforms, are crying out for a Labour party to revert to its democratic socialist traditions and put itself at the forefront of the fight-back. And this mood of radicalism will only increase in the months ahead, as households, already facing the biggest fall in living standards since the second world war, are hit with major increases in fuel bills and train fares. This should be a quite wonderful time to be the leader of a left-of-centre political party, but unless Miliband throws caution to the wind, he is unlikely to reap the full electoral benefit.

[TonyGosling]

Time for the Cuckoo to fly now!

Mark Serwotka: Why the PCS union could run its own election candidates
"The choice between Tory and Labour cuts is no choice at all," says the union leader, who wants to challenge the "austerity consensus".

By Mark Serwotka Published 02 July 2012 17:38
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/voices/2012/07/mark-serwotka-why-pcs -union-could-run-its-own-candidates

Faced with attacks on their conditions at work and at home more than a century ago, trade union members had a radical ambition: to break an anti-working class consensus maintained for generations by political elites whose interests were entirely at odds with the majority of people over whom they governed.

With today's Tory-led cabinet of millionaires driving through brutal and unnecessary spending cuts with no mandate, the need for the labour movement to fight politically as well as industrially is as urgent now as it was then.

In an historic ballot, PCS members have decided that we cannot just sit back and wait for this to happen, and we will now consider backing or standing our own candidates in national elections.

Our ballot result shows there is a real desire to challenge the modern consensus that accepts cuts to jobs, pay, pensions and essential public services are necessary to 'deal with the deficit'. A consensus that condemns our communities to despair.

Instead of creating jobs and getting people off benefits and into work, consider what this government is doing to cut £28 billion from welfare spending: targeting the sick and disabled, increasing sanctions for benefits and privatising back to work schemes, with the all-important mood music blaming 'workshy scroungers' for being out of work.

Too much of this, sadly, was set in train by Labour. And not only on welfare. They paved the way for this administration with foundation hospitals, academies and the tens of thousands of civil service job cuts that, to give just one example, mean there are now 30,000 fewer staff in HM Revenue and Customs than there were when it was formed in 2005. Meanwhile, more than £120 billion is lost in tax every year through tax evasion and avoidance and because there aren't the staff and resources to collect it.

Collecting even a percentage of these missing billions would change the debate about public spending overnight, and forms a central part of the alternative to austerity that we, and other unions, have been advocating.

So, where PCS members' jobs and public services are under threat, we will be pressing all candidates even harder to argue for this alternative. Where they refuse, we will consider throwing our weight behind those we can, in all conscience, support. Radical opposition to the diktats of the 'markets' has proven to be popular and successful in France, and we need candidates here who have the same courage and vision.

This is not a party political move. We have no interest in splitting the Labour vote to let a Tory in. Standing or supporting trade union candidates would be an exception, where no one else will stand up for our members' livelihoods and against the economic illiteracy of austerity.

We wouldn't have to do this if there were more Labour MPs prepared to speak up for trade union members, their families and their communities. But we do recognise that the choice between Tory and Labour cuts is no choice at all.

While clearly we will not be supporting Tories or Lib Dems – much less UKIP and the far right – our judgement will be based on the individual candidates, their records and what they stand for.

We already work very closely with MPs from Labour, Plaid Cymru and the Green party. So, as well as local anti-cuts candidates, it is entirely possible that decent MPs from established parties could get our backing.

The cuts consensus thrives on scapegoats, whether it is public sector workers, pensioners, students, or people entitled to benefits. We are pitted against one another, private versus public, young against old, made to choose between 'good' cuts and 'bad' ones.

But we know austerity isn't working and we know there is an alternative based on proper investment in our public services, not more cuts; on tackling the wealthy tax dodgers and helping out the millions instead of rewarding the millionaires.

We have had enough of politicians who consistently refuse to say these things. We have had enough of political elites fixing the terms of the debate.

In response to the biggest assault on our welfare state and our living conditions in anyone's memory, this is our radical ambition, fit for the 21st century, armed with a new weapon in our fight against austerity.

Mark Serwotka is general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union.