Skip to main content

Labour Leadership hopefuls thwarted by Socialist!

When Yvette Cooper today called for UK councils to each take a quota of Syrian refugees, it illustrated the pitfalls of political ambition. As is the custom for the modern breed of politician, she first went to Oxford to study politics, philosophy and economics in which she gained a first class honours degree. The daughter of the former leader of the Prospect union, she left Oxford to gain further qualifications at Harvard and the London School of Economics respectively. Then it was time to gain employment in the real world.

Her first job in 1990 was as a policy researcher for the then Labour leader John Smith. By 1992, she had left these shores to help Bill Clinton with his presidential campaign. Any chances of real experience of the real world were dashed when she came back to become a policy advisor to Harriet Harman. This was followed by a role working as a research associate at the Centre for Economic Performance. By 1995, she had progressed to become Chief Economic Correspondent for the Independent before finally achieving the dream which she had undoubtedly harboured since childhood. She became an MP in a safe seat in 1997. 1997 was the year Blair promised us all that things could only get better and she was one of the many Blair Babes.

She soon climbed the political ladder to serve under both Blair and Brown. Always a firm Blairite, she also married the man who would become synonymous with Blair's nemesis Gordon Brown. Ed Balls was arguably one of the highest profile casualties of the recent Ed Miliband leadership. Together, Balls and Cooper were ordered to pay back £1,363 in relation to mortgage over-payments on one of their second homes. For Labour, the 2015 election will go down as one of their most disastrous and Blair and Brown must both accept the blame for that.

When Cooper (who chooses not to take the surname of her husband) made her plea for UK councils to take in Syrian refugees, she was perhaps overlooking her own role in that. As a major player in the Blair government which erroneously took us to war with Iraq, she started a ball rolling which has led us to the current Middle East crisis with huge swathes of Syria, Iraq and Libya being over-run with civil war or with Islamist terrorists. The history books now show that the vote taken by the Blair government was taken with false information. Worse still though, Cooper herself admitted that she would vote for the same cuts currently being meted out by the Tories. In other words, she was a true Blairite content to try and appear to be more conservative than the Tories themselves. It is another example of the sort of decision making of which the UK electorate becomes weary very quickly.

More recently, her lifelong quest to scale the political ladder has been derailed by an old school socialist whose policies are unwavering and based on real conviction. For a New Labour darling, this really must be the the ultimate insult. The very party which she has spent her life saving from the perceived ills of socialism is about to be reclaimed by a real life socialist. Oh the irony!

But let us return to that contest. Cooper has tried to throw all kinds of accusations at Jeremy Corbyn and each time she does, his odds of winning the contest just get slashed even more. Put simply, she has fallen in to the same trap as Miliband. By concentrating too much on her opponent, she has neglected to tell her electorate about her own policies. Just as the UK electorate would not sanction the appointment of the Brownite Blair as Chancellor in May, neither will they sanction his wife as Labour leader. The kiss of death for her chances of leadership was delivered this week when Gordon Brown came out in support of her.

She will be one of the last remnants of a time in UK politics when image took centre-stage with policies quietly taking their place on the back seat. Thanks to the decision of Labour to seek candidates from all sides of the party, we can now wave goodbye to that unhappy episode in our political life. We can now get back to the real lives of real people who have real experience of the challenges which sometimes mean the difference between      

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Breaking the cycle

I have always been drawn to a good analogy. Recently, a very simple analogy was related to me which can be adapted to just about every walk of life. The analogy tells of a man standing on the banks of a river fishing dead bodies out as they float downstream. Another man comes along and instead walks upstream to try and find where they are coming from. Like all truly great analogies it is beautiful in its simplicity and easy to follow. I applied it in several contexts as I am sure you will already have done. In their wisdom (and if I was inclined to a mere slither of cynicism), the Welsh Government have once again sought to emulate their Scottish cousins by proposing a minimum pricing on alcohol. They claim that a minimum price of 50p per unit of alcohol might save the Welsh economy £1 billion annually. That is quite a claim. This is apparently based on research assessing crime, illness and workplace absence over the last 20 years. So why not just introduce this measure (no pun intend...
Post a Comment
Read more

Public Engagement

What is the biggest difference between the Labour party of today and it's early incarnation under Keir Hardy? I think the answer to that question lies with all of us. It now astonishing to reflect upon the voter turnout for the General Election of 1950. A staggering 83.9% of the then electorate exercised their right to vote. That figure rose to 66.1% of the electorate at the last election. Why then have so many of us just opted out in the intervening years? Before answering that question, it is not all doom and gloom. The lowest turnout so far was in 2001 when a paltry 59.1% turned out to vote. That is all the more remarkable when we consider that the 1997 election which brought Tony Blair to power amassed an impressive 71.4%. That is quite a drop in just four years. But even that figure of 71.4% is pretty poor when compared to John Major's turnout of 77.7% in 1992. Either we are entering a new period of increased voter engagement or we have just witnessed a blip in the ove...
Post a Comment
Read more