Miliband Minor; Not a "Socialist Intellectual"

To most people, Ed Miliband is a pompous, indignant potato wearing a bad wig. Not for Labour "thinker" Maurice "Halt Immigration" Glasman. According to that weapons grade bellend, the failing leader of the opposition is best described as follows:

He described the Labour leader, whose Marxist father was a university lecturer, as "socialist and an intellectual" with an "angry insurgent side".

The final description is perhaps the most laughable. Ed Miliband, a vacuous political lightweight, is not a "angry insurgent" in any way, shape of form. He is not the political equivalent of an IED. He is the political equivalent of a jobsworth promoted well beyond his actualy level of ability.

As for socialist - if he is a socialist, then he shouldn't be in the Labour party. That party became a caricature of itself a long time ago, and while it remains statist to its core, it lost its socialism when Michael Foot demonstrated that socialism was about as popular as mass dysentry in the 1983 election. A true socialist would join the Greens. Or maybe waste their time in the SWP. The Labour party is for naked political careerists who want to be seen as slightly more touchy- feely than the Tories. The Labour party remains a dangerous, statist organisation that should not be in power. But that does not make it socialist. Whether it was truly a socialist organisation is a debate for another day; here it is worth noting that a socialist in the Labour party is someone in entirely the wrong organisation.

And intellectual? Please. Modern politics is no place for a true intellectual. Just as it is no place for someone who genuinely has principles or a moral compass. In order to be a modern politician you need to switch off your brain and compromise both your principles and whatever morals you might have. That is why we end up with bland, empty political ciphers as our party leaders. Y'know, people like Clegg, Cameron and, well, Miliband Minor.

Since the moment he declared his candidacy for the Labour leadership, people have been trying to make out that Miliband Minor is some sort of return by the Labour party to its roots - that he is a new radical who is destined to bring about a brave, new socialist dawn for his party and then for his country. This plan is, of course, fatally flawed in one crucial way - it has Ed Miliband at its centre. A loathsome little individual who is so lacking in charisma and conviction that his own brother - a total dweeb in his own right - thought that the best thing for the party was to continue to fight against him. The likes of Glasman can make up whatever shit they want to about Miliband Minor; the fact of the matter is that the sooner they wake up and realise that Miliband Minor is a fucking disaster, the sooner they can actually get around to electing a credible leader. Not a socialist intellectual (nor should they want one, given how that socialist intellectual Foot did as leader), but a credible leader.

Glasman, Immigration and the BNP

Maurice Glasman, key expounder of "Blue Labour" and general ideologue for Ed Miliband, on immigration:

In an interview with this newspaper, he said: “We've got to reinterrogate our relationship with the EU on the movement of labour.

“The EU has gone from being a sort of pig farm subsidised bloc to the free movement of labour and capital.”

He added: “Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first."

Asked if that meant stopping immigration virtually completely for a period, he said: “Yes. I would add that we should be more generous and friendly in receiving those [few] who are needed. To be more generous, we have to draw the line."

Oh, whoopie-fuck. Another poltical figure jumping on the anti-immigration bandwagon. And another figure with genuine political influence only seeing a problem with the monolithic, bureaucratic, profligate and largely unaccountable EU on account of its impact on immigration. Surely it isn't too much to hope that political thinkers in this country could have slightly more meaningful inspirations that a compendium of anti-immigration headlines from The Daily fucking Mail.

Of course, Ed Miliband has distanced himself from these largely toxic propositions. But this is the same Ed Miliband who has been waffling on about the "mistakes" that the Labour government (of which he was a part, natch) made in regard to immigration when in power at the same time as being the Ed Miliband who slavishly followed Gordon "British Jobs for British Workers" Brown. Difficult to imagine where Glasman might have got the idea that his anti-immigration views might have gone down with Miliband Minor, eh?

There is so much talk about whether Social Democracy or neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology in this country, and therefore whether Thatcher or Blair actually won the battle to dominate the consensus politics in this country. When I see yet another political figure slating immigration, I can't help but wonder whether the BNP have actually succeeded in dominating political discourse in this country, at least when it comes to immigration.

Update: Obnoxio the Clown agrees with me. Using language (and imagery) that makes my own look quite restrained.