by Daniel Korski | Aug 20, 2008 | UK
Over on the Guardian website, Nick Brown, a senior Labour leader, is supporting Russia’s invasion of Georgia to make a partisan political attack against David Cameron. You have to read it to believe it.
No doubt there is cause to criticize Georgia – I certainly have. But at a time when civilians are dying, Russia has invaded a neighbouring country (refusing to honour a ceasefire agreement) and David Cameron stole a march on both Gordon Brown and David Miliband, the Labour Whip’s article is, frankly, pathetic.
RICHARD ADDS: it may be even lower than Daniel reckons. Check out Andrew Sparrow’s theory that this is all a coded attack on David Miliband.
by Alex Evans | Aug 8, 2008 | Economics and development, UK
Jim Pickard at the FT’s excellent Westminster blog has been wondering whether David Miliband really has the common touch. “Will the public warm,” he wonders, “to the former policy wonk who – despite shedding the previous Mr Logic image – is still best known as an intellectual?”
In seeking to answer that question, he turns to Gideon Rachman’s profile of Miliband from earlier this year. “Here,” he proffers, “is one extract:”
“Amartya Sen is a brilliant man,” remarks Miliband. “I think his argument that there is a fusion tradition – a liberal tradition that is concerned with social justice – is right. And I admire his work on capabilities, and on freedom as capability.”
Hmm: is that really all that nerdy? It’s not as if Miliband is the only Cabinet member who’s into Sen: so are Gordon Brown, Douglas Alexander, and Hilary Benn (who quoted his views on freedom at length in his preface to DFID’s third White Paper). David Cameron turned out to be a fan too, when he made his first big speech on development back in 2006.
Here’s a profile of Sen from back in 2000 by Meghnad Desai in case you haven’t made the acquaintance of this excellent writer; his book Development as Freedom can’t be recommended highly enough.
by Charlie Edwards | Aug 6, 2008 | Conflict and security, North America, UK
The Wednesday quiz is back*
Tara Parker-Pope, the health guru at the New York Times has created a quiz based on the brilliant book The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley (it should have been on the Conservatives reading list).
Take the quiz
* This is not strictly true.
by Charlie Edwards | Aug 3, 2008 | UK
I can’t be the only one scratching my head at the Conservative Party’s summer holiday reading list. It’s week 2 of silly season, I grant you, and journalists will take pretty much anything on offer, but this just smacks of column filling (that said perhaps some of the larger tomes will act as wind breakers and/or sun shades on the beach).
According to the Sunday Times the reading list was chosen by Keith Simpson, a shadow foreign affairs spokesman and a former lecturer at Cranfield and Sandhurst. This is clearly reflected in his choice of reading material as 24 of the 38 books are on military history, geography, and terrorism. Nudge, the book currently feted by all three political parties looks like a definite afterthought.
What I find so puzzling is the choice of books on offer. I really can’t believe Cameron will be leafing through Empires of the Sea or Five Days in London on his hols.
There are no decent books on China (the more recent by Will Hutton, Charles Grant and Mark Leonard). What about Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody; Diplomacy by Henry Kissenger, or Thomas Rick’s Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005? The list of good books is endless – this list is meaningless.
MPs have approximately 11 weeks off, so here’s how they might spend their summer holiday (according to Keith Simpson):
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by David Steven | Aug 1, 2008 | Influence and networks, UK
I think Jules gets it wrong in his analysis of the options facing David Miliband. Jules writes:
If he doesn’t make an outright challenge for the leadership now, he will look like he has bottled it, twice, and will begin to look like the Michael Portillo of the Labour Party. If he does challenge Brown and lose, he will look like a loser. If he wins, he will most probably lose the election against Cameron, and will look like a loser. And, least likely scenario of all, if he wins the election against Cameron, he will still have to rule the country with a screwed up economy and a disgruntled electorate grown tired of Labour.
He should have let Brown lose, let the Tories win, let the Tories wallow in recession, let Labour re-group and himself assert his authority over the party in opposition, before coming back to beat the PR toff PM, who will very likely underperform when in power.
As I argued in my post on disruptive politics, the problem is in Jules’s seductively simple prescription that, after an election defeat, Miliband should “let Labour re-group and himself assert his authority over the party in opposition.”
That’s very unlikely to happen – even with a failing economy as the albatross around David Cameron’s neck. In opposition, demoralised by electoral humiliation, and with many of its most talented figures without seats, the Labour Party is almost certain to tear itself apart (with the media fuelling the frenzy).
That’s why Miliband’s best hope (from a self-interested point of view) is to take over now, head quickly for an election, and use his honeymoon bounce to try and turn a disastrous loss into the kind of battling one that the British love.
Momentum is everything in politics. If Miliband’s Labour were to lose the election on the up, then Cameron would take over as PM already looking rattled. In opposition, Miliband could focus his troops on a counter-attack – encouraging the media to sniff Tory not Labour blood.
Take over after a monumental landslide, in contrast, and the psychological damage would already have been done. Labour will spend years portrayed as hapless losers – remember how long it took the Conservatives to escape from this trap.
Miliband would not longer be a prospective Prime Minister. He’d be William Hague, starting a painful period of rebuilding that will benefit the next leader, or the next but one. Then his best hope would be ending up as Foreign Secretary again – in nine or ten years’ time.
