So What do we think of "Red Ed"

ballysmate

Unfortunately people have short memories when it comes to voting. The memory of the debacle, which was the last government, will have faded and people will start to think that Labour is worth a punt because the incumbent is unpopular. As someone posted earlier, it is likely that Milliband may be PM, as the Tories are not ahead in any poll and need a lead of 7.5% to secure a majority.
http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics ... ry-cameron

As someone else pointed out, socialism is the politics of envy. The cry from the left is always the same, 'They have got more than me, it's not fair, take it off them!' A capitalist would ask,' They have more than me, how can I improve my lot and get where they are?'

Socialists would rather see 1,000,000 in poverty than 1 person rich and 999,999 in poverty.

Labour spent 13 years spending money that the country didn't have and if elected next time, will carry on where they left off. It is in their DNA, they can't help it. They will attack the banks and big companies, as they see them as the enemy in their class war.
Wanchors.

arran77

Labour, the modern day Robin Hood :roll:

ballysmate

There is a caveat to my above post.
Socialists are happy as long as they are not amongst the 1,000,000 in poverty. They have different rules for themselves. their policies and ideals are for others to live by, not them.

Stevo_666

Pross wrote:

I might not be a socialist but at least in the past their politicians had the courage of their convictions and would stand by their left wing policies even if it meant not getting elected. Better to be in opposition and stand by your principles than to get elected at all costs.

Milipede is not totally stupid - he realises that if he comes out with 'proper' left wing policies labour will be pretty much unelectable - think of the policies in the Foot and Kinnock regimes and how that kept the Tories in power for nearly 2 decades. I wish he had the courage of his convictions

GiantMike

Stevo 666 wrote:

I wish he had the courage of his convictions

Interesting. As a professional politician, do you think he has any genuine convictions?

Stevo_666

GiantMike wrote:

Stevo 666 wrote:

I wish he had the courage of his convictions

Interesting. As a professional politician, do you think he has any genuine convictions?

I think he may well do - but hard to tell. Seem to remember Milipede senior was a proper commie so I guess he will have some deeply ingrained socialist ethos acquired from his formative years. What he lacks is the balls to go with them - or is simply being pragmatic for the reasons I gave above.

Tom Butcher

Wanting to narrow the ever widening gap between rich and poor is not the politics of envy. Yes of course doing that will hurt some people financially - those that can well afford it.

As for experience of the real world - at least he went to a fairly average state school - yes we have too many career politicians these days but Labour isn't alone in that.

arran77

GiantMike wrote:

Stevo 666 wrote:

I wish he had the courage of his convictions

Interesting. As a professional politician, do you think he has any genuine convictions?

Probably, they're all crooks just trying to line their own pockets

GiantMike

Tom Butcher wrote:

Wanting to narrow the ever widening gap between rich and poor is not the politics of envy.

If this is achieved through providing more opportunites for all, then I'm in favour if it. If it's achieved by taking wealth off of one group and giving it to another, then that's the politics of envy.

verylonglegs

I've just read someone elses comment on another site that the Labour Energy minister who oversaw most of the current policy when they were in power, including some of the significant price increases, was none other than...er..Ed Miliband. Think that absurdity sums up politics in this country.

MaxwellBygraves

Stevo 666 wrote:

Seem to remember Milipede senior was a proper commie

Ralph Miliband was one of the foremost Marxist academics of the 20th C.

Interestingly enough, he spent most of his life works either directly or indirectly trying to show why he thought parliamentary/representative democracy was inadequate to bring about true socialism. Which I would imagine is partly why Ed rarely if ever mentions his dad in speeches, yet he talks about his mum quite a lot.

Ralph's buried in Highgate cemetry close to the grave of Karl Marx.

SpainSte

Fixing the price of energy probably won't work, the best example of this in a similar economy is what happened in California 200/01. We are in a similar position in terms of require investment etc too so this is a really good example.

The land-grab idea is terrible, far too Stalinist for my liking.


Also, is Ed the worst public speaker in the history of professional public speaking? Horrible voice, horrible presence on the stage, terrible emotional intelligence, although he didnt read from notes it still came through as horribly scripted.

Socialist policies probably won't do much for Ed outside of the Labour heartlands of the north of England and Scotland. Having said that, if Scotland vote for independance next year and Labour lose those seats it could be quite sometime before Labour are voted in again!

GiantMike

SpainSte wrote:

Having said that, if Scotland vote for independance next year and Labour lose those seats it could be quite sometime before Labour are voted in again!

I was thinking the same yesterday afternoon. Suddenly the Labour McHeartland vanishes and the Tories do a little jump for joy. At the same time Labour party funds hit by Ed's severing of the party's links with the Unions. Ed's response seems to be letting kids vote!

SpainSte

GiantMike wrote:

Ed's response seems to be letting kids vote!

Yeah I was quite surprised by this too, although I don't know why I was, typical opportunism really.

DeVlaeminck

GiantMike wrote:

Tom Butcher wrote:

Wanting to narrow the ever widening gap between rich and poor is not the politics of envy.

If this is achieved through providing more opportunites for all, then I'm in favour if it. If it's achieved by taking wealth off of one group and giving it to another, then that's the politics of envy.

No it's the politics of fairness. Presumably you don't believe in complete anarchy - so there has to be some kind of system - rule of law - politics is really just an argument about who that favours. Our system is more and more favouring the few over the many.

DeVlaeminck

As for the land idea - why not - why should be think of every single thing as being freely available to be bought and sold by anyone no matter what the negative consequences. Presumably the policy would be a case of changing the policy framework to deincentivise hoarding land as an investment rather than just taking it and giving it to his supporters Mugabe style.

rhext

I still don't think they've 'got' it. All they've done so far is announce populist policies that involve spending more money.

I used to take the view that the financial crisis was global and blaming labour for it was a bit much. I still hold that view to a certain extent, but what has become more and more apparent is the sheer scale of what they were spending vs what they were bringing in - and that was when the going was good. They didn't have the guts to make the unpopular decisions needed to keep public spending under control, and during the 'good times' they didn't have to. They just let it drift and now the Tories and the Lib Dems are having to pick up the pieces: do the hard work that Labour didn't have the bottle for.

If they want me to vote for them, they need to do more than throw in a few carrots. They need to tell me how they're going to get the deficit under control. Spending promises just tell me that they still don't really understand the mess they left.

GiantMike

DeVlaeminck wrote:

GiantMike wrote:

Tom Butcher wrote:

Wanting to narrow the ever widening gap between rich and poor is not the politics of envy.

If this is achieved through providing more opportunites for all, then I'm in favour if it. If it's achieved by taking wealth off of one group and giving it to another, then that's the politics of envy.

No it's the politics of fairness. Presumably you don't believe in complete anarchy - so there has to be some kind of system - rule of law - politics is really just an argument about who that favours. Our system is more and more favouring the few over the many.

Any examples?

GiantMike

DeVlaeminck wrote:

As for the land idea - why not - why should be think of every single thing as being freely available to be bought and sold by anyone no matter what the negative consequences. Presumably the policy would be a case of changing the policy framework to deincentivise hoarding land as an investment rather than just taking it and giving it to his supporters Mugabe style.

Local auths have a lot of land that they don't build on and there's a shortage of social housing because successive govts since 1979 have sold a lot of it off. Ed's brand of envy socialism is shallow and divisive, blaming the rich and big business for the ills of the country when it was socialist extravagance that nearly bankrupted the country. After 3 years out of govt does the Labour party really think people have forgotten how devious, dishonest and incompetent it was?

rick_chasey

SpainSte wrote:

Fixing the price of energy probably won't work, the best example of this in a similar economy is what happened in California 200/01.

Appreciate this is beside the op but this is incorrect. Problems started when power market was liberalised in a half cocked way which made it ripe for trading 'abuse' (see enron's west coast power fine) and introducing price ceilings was a response to that and had a reasonable if limited success.

MaxwellBygraves

Steve Bell in the Guardian

daviesee

Quite a good link as everyone's pensions will be linked to the power companies profits.

arran77

Rick Chasey wrote:

SpainSte wrote:

Fixing the price of energy probably won't work, the best example of this in a similar economy is what happened in California 200/01.

Appreciate this is beside the op but this is incorrect. Problems started when power market was liberalised in a half cocked way which made it ripe for trading 'abuse' (see enron's west coast power fine) and introducing price ceilings was a response to that and had a reasonable if limited success.

This is not correct, the energy crisis in California was as a result of three things, power companies manipulation of the market by shutting down power stations (as you state RC), illegal shutting down of supply pipelines AND prices being capped.

Price ceilings were not a response to these problems, they were one of the causes :roll:

rhext

The thing that worries me about the energy debate is that it all centres round gross operating profit, which is only ever stated as a simple (large) number. First problem is that on its own the simple number doesn't tell you anything about how profitable the company is...a profit of a billion sound huge but on a turnover of 100 billion it's barely scraping by.

But if 950m of that 100m is reinvested back in to infrastructure, that company really doesn't have anywhere to go if the global wholesale price goes up. If we really want to understand whether the energy companies are making unreasonable profits, we need those numbers put into context...something which our 'unbiased' media sources seem incapable of doing. Perhaps because 'evil energy company makes 2bn profit' sells more copy than 'evil energy company makes 1% profit, most of which it uses to build new power stations'.
But it's ok because labour have conducted a thorough analysis of the past performance of the energy market and are 100% confident that the future performance can be predicted on that basis. He actually said that on the today programme.which begs the question why he's bothering to mess around in the margins instead of solving the deficit by speculating on the global energy market...

...and they wonder why their economic credibility is poor....

zingaiya

Could we stop referring to any of Eds policies as "socialist" please?
They're not. They're just shit and ill thought out. Ed is about as socialist as Blair.

bompington

Zingaiya wrote:

Could we stop referring to any of Eds policies as "socialist" please?

Absolutely - it would be much more accurate to describe the proposed undeveloped land confiscations as Stalinist.

GiantMike

Zingaiya wrote:

Could we stop referring to any of Eds policies as "socialist" please?
They're not. They're just shoot and ill thought out. Ed is about as socialist as Blair.

But Ed claims to be a Socialist. THIS INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT says so (it's from 2010 BTW).

bompington

GiantMike wrote:

Zingaiya wrote:

Could we stop referring to any of Eds policies as "socialist" please?
They're not. They're just shoot and ill thought out. Ed is about as socialist as Blair.

But Ed claims to be a Socialist. THIS INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT says so (it's from 2010 BTW).

Or from 2013...

In a question-and-answer session, Mr Miliband was asked when he would “bring back socialism”. He replied: “That’s what we are doing, Sir.”

rick_chasey

arran77 wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

SpainSte wrote:

Fixing the price of energy probably won't work, the best example of this in a similar economy is what happened in California 200/01.

Appreciate this is beside the op but this is incorrect. Problems started when power market was liberalised in a half cocked way which made it ripe for trading 'abuse' (see enron's west coast power fine) and introducing price ceilings was a response to that and had a reasonable if limited success.

This is not correct, the energy crisis in California was as a result of three things, power companies manipulation of the market by shutting down power stations (as you state RC), illegal shutting down of supply pipelines AND prices being capped.

Price ceilings were not a response to these problems, they were one of the causes :roll:

The capping started later. Traders would, for example, book far too much power to go down one line. Once it became clear the line couldn't take all the power the state would be forced to buy at a higher premium rate. These rates would go totally batshit high. Hence introducing the caps later on.

secretsam

Fair play to him for having some cojones and being prepared to stand up for some principles

I have great admiration for people like that, be they "Wedgy" Benn (a personal hero) or - and I mean this - Thatcher (may she rot in peace)

Frankly, anything that counteracts odious toads like Osborne gets my vote every time

And the Lib Dems can Fuck off too, backsliding dirty lickspittles