David Miliband is still hogging all of the airwaves.  In a constructive article, he essentially slapped Brown in the face and declared himself to be ready to lead a regicidal coup in the Labour party.  I wrote about my Miliband hypothesis this morning, but refained from further comment throughout the day because I was aware of the fast-changing nature of the narrative.  Things look slightly clearer in tomorrow’s papers, and I am of the opinion that Harriet Harman could well be feeling pretty happy with herself.

During the day, it became clear that David Miliband had hastily cancelled a trip to India in a few weeks’ time.  To begin with, it looked as if he was clearing his diary for a leadership race through Conference season.  Then we were told that he would be using that time for meetings with Cabinet colleagues.  Tomorrow’s Times has “David Miliband ordered to cancel trip as Gordon Brown seeks to restore authority“.  In other words, Mr Miliband will probably no longer be the Foreign Secretary by the end of the month.

At this point, it is worth suggesting that Brown’s salvage strategy might not be disastrous.  Our esteemed Chancellor is almost as dreadful as his next-door neighbour, and Miliband cannot be demoted.  We can probably expect Miliband to be given the poisoned chalice of Number 11, while the Foreign Office brief could perhaps be returned to Jack Straw to shut him up for a while.  Who can say?  One thing is certain: if the Labour party heads into the Conference with some fresh blood in its main arteries, some life could be pumped back into the party machine.  It is not entirely inconceivable that, if policy-heavy speeches from promoted ministers with fresh brief go down well, Brown could use his keynote speech to tell his party to prepare for an election.  Vitality and bravery, stemming the loss of seats.  The Tories are still not prepared for office, and they have not earned their place in the opinion polls.  Miliband would keep clean, and try for leadership once the dust of defeat had settled.  Brown’s (5th? 6th?) fightback attempt might just be the most sensible strategy for the moment.

This hypothesising is good fun, but otherwise worthless.  Recent history suggests that Gordon Brown’s strategy, with his apparent decades of honing his political acumen, is less robust than my rambling thoughts.  Let us deal instead, then, with what we can be reasonably certain of.  Gordon Brown will not last beyond spring 2010, and a leadership race will occur some time in the next 18 months as a result.  David Miliband doubtless knows that he stands in a strong place to win, and has this week essentially begun his campaign.  But there will be “I’m not Miliband” candidates, and there will be “anyone but Miliband” voters.  James Forsyth, on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog, has suggested that Harriet Harman appears to be everything Miliband is not.  It could be Harriet by September, he argues: a sobering thought indeed.  As one D. Miliband would say “in six months’ time, people will be saying ‘I don’t like Harman, let’s have that Brown back’” - he’s prescient like that.

Harriet Harman will be sitting pretty tonight.  She knows that she emerged from recent speculation about leadership ambitions far more positively than Miliband is managing.  She also knows that she can win the support of the Labour Party, and has her useful husband as a strong tie to the Unions.  Miliband has never been tested by a national party election process, and is comfortably distant from the Unions.  What is more, Harriet Harman is seen as a bit of a joke - a loose cannon; a bit of an embarrassment.  Should she try for leadership and lose, she would benefit from the fact that few people take her seriously to begin with.  But she has proved that she is a force to be reckoned with.

Quentin Letts had a sketch in the Daily Mail today outlining his view of a Harman premiership.  In it, he disgracefully employs every mysogonistic quip about women in government and parodies Harman as a total lightweight.  He paints a picture of Harman as a disgusting man-hating feminist, who has Andy Burnam as the only man in her cabinet because of his nice eyelashes.  It is a truly horrendous piece.  But it plays right into Harriet’s hands.  Remember her awful trying-to-be-a-joke-but-even-the-row-of-allies-on-the-front-bench-were-cringing comment at PMQs the other week?  Asked to consider herself as prime minister, her reaction was some misplaced jibe about there not being enough airports in the country for all of the men who would emigrate.  A perfect opportunity to allow the pubic the opportunity to picture her as PM and she tells them how men hate her because she is a feminist.  This is the image she wants to be portrayed!  He colleagues cringe because gender warfare, like the class warfare of Crewe and Nantwich, has no place in modern politics.  But she wants to bring it back with a vengeance, and she hopes that the grassroots Labour party will support her aims to resurrect it in the coming leadership contest.

Miliband is looking to government; to policy, strategy, and legislating.  Harman is looking to get herself elected leader.  One strategy can yield short-term gain, but spells long-term disaster (for a recent historical reference, consult Mr. G. Brown).  The other is a thoughtful, sensible and wise approach to party leadership: not just getting there, but doing something valuable with it.  It was Brown’s downfall, and it is guaranteed to be Harman’s.  She might be smiling now, like Brown was in summer last year, but six months into her leadership and the wheels will be well and truly off the Labour Party’s ailing wagon.

David Miliband’s article in the Guardian yesterday was a reasonable attempt to get the Labour party off the back foot. Since October last year, the narrative has been all Tory ascendancy and Labour distress. Miliband is of the gang of ministers ready to take New Labour - a ’90s philosophy - into the second decade of the 21st century. He honestly believes in what he proposes, and honestly disapproves of Conservative policy.

One senses a mild feeling of frustration from Miliband. Here he is, cometh the hour, etc, and Brown is sending Labour’s last chance for electoral success down the drain. Gordon Brown cannot talk about the future. He can tell us how he is “getting on with the job”, and is the “right man to get us through these difficult times”. He portrays himself as the man of the hour, forgetting, perhaps, that he created the circumstances he now believes he should get us out of. Miliband, on the other hand, has been largely untainted by back-room squabbles under both Blair’s leadership and Brown’s. Indeed, the mere fact that commentators are asking whether the Foreign Secretary has enough experience for the Premiership is evidence enough that he gets his head down and gets on with the job. Who was David Cameron before 2005? Miliband is no lightweight.

What interests me most, though, is that Miliband has tried to critique the Tories. He is confident that, in a genuine battle of ideas, Labour would win. For denying the opportunity to have such a battle, Gordon Brown is to blame. David Miliband is careful to spell out Labour’s future, but is right to contrast it with that of the Conservatives. Just read from his much-discussed but little-read article yesterday:

The Tories overclaim for what they are against because they don’t know what they are for. I disagreed with Margaret Thatcher, but at least it was clear what she stood for. She sat uncomfortably within the Tory party because she was a radical, not a conservative. She wanted change and was prepared to take unpopular decisions to achieve it.

The problem with David Cameron is the reverse. His problem is he is a conservative, not a radical. He doesn’t share a restlessness for change. He may be likable and sometimes hard to disagree with, but he is empty. He is a politician of the status quo — even a status quo he consistently voted against — not change.

Find me a floating voter who does not agree with that. Miliband took some stick for writing an article about Labour’s future, but somebody had to start discussing it before it is too late. If the Labour party wants to salvage itself, policy strategists like Miliband should be ready to discuss policy strategy! Brown is as childish as he is selfish. If he will not resign, he should be deposed.

So, I ask, should the Tories be afraid of Miliband? If he were to become leader this autumn, and call a General Election within the month, he would send shockwaves through Westminster. But in the intense media storm of a snap election and new leader, he could push his policy and methods of government strongly. The Tories would be caught off-guard, and their flimsy policy would be open to as stringent study as is possible. Miliband would lose, certainly, but by small enough a margin to keep his role of leader for the coming Parliament, in which he would be a strong opponant to the limited Tory majority government. The Tory dream of a comfortable decade in power would be gone: they would be struggling five years down the line. The Tories should be very scared of this scenario. All that stands in its way is the fickleness of Gordon Brown’s unstable character.

Some mainstream media blogs are usually worth reading.  I like the Telegraph’s blog network - the content is thick and fast, but posts are always refreshingly short.  A good balance.  Until this kind of rubbish finds its way onto their webspace.

I am sure Melissa Kite is a journalist of merit (although I can’t say I have every been overwhelmed by one of her articles), but her comment on David Cameron’s suggestions of alcohol leave a lot to be desired.  In an informal atmosphere, Cameron was hypothesising on the role of alcohol in the home - namely that if people drink sensibly in the home, they tend not to drink stupidly outdoors.  The continental model.  It is a common line of thought, and deserves consideration.  To rubbish it as a principle because some deliberately silly hypothetical central government project to promote drinking at home would clearly not work is shoddy journalism.  It is no way to make an argument, even if it is via a blog.

The longer the media take the attitude “I wouldn’t write this for the print media, but it’s fine for the blog”, the longer it will take for them to catch up with the wider blogosphere.

For what it’s worth, I think the cultural attitude to alcohol goes much deeper than whether or not people drink small quantities at home from a reasonably young age, but this is a reasonable approach to take with one’s own kids.  One things I can agree with Melissa Kite on, despite her chronic approach to argument, is that any state attempt to encourage this sensible behaviour would be impossible and equally undesirable.

“The Labour party never does mad things.”

David Miliband

I can’t decide who I want to lose.

May they die in each others arms. Soon.

Time for another musical interlude, as I need to go and write Sunday’s post. So, we’ll begin with a little gloom:

Before moving onto what’s undisputedly the sound of an electronic orgy:

And finally:

And with that, good night. Normal service will resume on my part tomorrow.

Miliband makes me seem all prescient.

Not that this was what I was expecting. A seemingly non sequitorious reference to the admittedely influential expanding Indian and Chinese middle classes seems typical of him. He has clearly embraced his brief as foreign secretary. He has also demanded quite a substantial amount from the government, certainly more than it has delivered thus far and, as the article mentions, he has not stated that Brown is a figure the party is dependent upon.

No, Miliband desires that Labour find itself a new soul. This is crucial to his argument that Cameron can not defeat Labour fully: if Labour can alter itself away from New Labour, Miliband suggests, the Tories will remain one step behind. Of the two assessments of the situation I find his entirely superior to Harman’s. Miliband seems to recognise, or at least is the only member of the Labour Party willing to admit, that the damage done to his party is deep. Perhaps Harman is restricted through her forced smile after one smashing defeat after another became stuck (I always found it quite unkind how she was expected to do the PR mop-up on national television time and time again…) but she has expressed no concern as to Labour’s direction.

Miliband, meanwhile, is steets ahead of not only her but the rest of the Labour high rankers. In this article in April he outlined what he thought Labour had to become in order to surive: a creature distinct from its 2001 incarnation and instead on informed by radical liberals and social democrats, something which I found most pleasing seeing as these are my favourite forms of leftist in history. Perhaps as good he is conscious of the enormity of the task facing Britain if it is to do its part in averting environment catastrophe: what is required is not merely a shift in policy but an entirely new structure for the economy, in lieu of rampant engorgement on petrol.

Miliband’s vision is given a new urgency by the dire state that Labour has plunged into: now the party’s future effectively rests upon whether it can be convincingly and winningly realised. It would be a remarkable achievement were it accomplished, and I suspect that in private Miliband shares my severe doubt that Brown is the man to do as much. No, to implement the vision there is none better than the visionary.

Harman has joined the chorus in favour of Brown remaining in power, that consists most notably of Straw and Prescott. In other words, everyone that is important save Miliband. No major Labour MP has moved against Brown, with a pair of back-benchers speaking out in favour of him leaving but any movement against Brown seemingly having no leader and limited support. Not least because a less than negligible number of Labour MPs would lose their seats were present polls correct.

My prediction is that nothing will come of any plots that may be bubbling at present towards the end of deposing Brown. However, the political oblivion which faced the Labour Party will be even more difficult to avert with a lame duck seated as its leader. The best than can be hoped for is Brown somehow manages to turn around Labour’s fortune and that the next two years see an economic upturn little short of miraculous.

The recent policies announced by Brown were a good start: although they’ll doubtless agitate business, insisting as they do that they stop exploiting workers as thoroughly as they were once allowed to, they reduce the amount of ageism mildly (although not enough) and reduced some of the absurdity of PFI schemes in hospitals. More of this would be welcome and although it is almost certainly too late now that Brown is effectively free he can focus upon leaving a pleasing legacy behind him.

Oh no, another toss-up between my virulent anti-theism and desire to allow free expression to flourish is required. How irksome.

Complicating this matter there is the whole “Multi-Cultural” angle, with this one calling herself “A proud Welsh and Punjabi Sikh girl.” Why exactly she would be proud of being Welsh or, more seriously, feel the need to distinguish herself from others who share the affliction is beyond me. Regardless, the model I have always admired for integration is that offered by the Zorastrians while seeking entry to India. They assured their potential hosts that they would dissolve “As honey into milk” when entering their new home. I suppose that a few bangles are modest enough to be deemed appropriate remnants of such a solution.

But this ruling still troubles me. It claims that the school was guilty of “Indirect discrimination” and in breach of race laws. Exactly how does it constitute discrimination to enforce rules equally upon Sikhs to upon those of other or no faith? Surely this is the total reverse of discrimination?

Perhaps the optimum solution would be the school simply taking a less hard-line stance and relaxing uniform policy. That she was suspended for so minor an offence is the root cause of this nonsense. I see no reason, though, that the school should honour irrational leaps of assumption and their sartorial implications over any other piece of reasoning. Where precisely is the distinction between somebody who has a “Lucky” bracelet and one that thinks it is representative of some fictional creature lasting for infinity?

I have no doubt that Singh is sincere in her conviction but there is no cause to imagine that her choice in garb is any better supported besides theology. It was an immensely petty to have her so severely punished over, but the same is true of any student.

Inspiration for these has, by now, deserted me. So, the only successful poem I’ve ever written instead:

A tree;
It be.

So there.