Political Ramble
So the Labour Party have now got Ed Miliband as their leader. Note I do not say the Labour Party has elected Ed Miliband as their leader, because I’m not entirely convinced they have. The vote went down to the wire and Ed won over his brother David by 1.3% in the last round. David had been ahead every round before, and the stats show that Ed won over his brother on trade union votes. Those folks in trade unions are not necessarily members of the labour party themselves. They could even be members of another political party. It seems absurd to me that a member of the Liberal Democrats could be able to vote for the Labour Party leader. Also, if you are a member of a trade union, and a member of the Labour Party (and many are), then you get two votes, at least. I’m not against trade unions in the slightest, and I think they get an awful lot of bad press these days which partly cannot be helped because generally they come to public attention when they strike, or threaten to, a move which isn’t popular with the general public understandably for the inconvenience it causes, but it is a last resort and is most certainly not the only work a TU does. They do a lot of individual representation in employment tribunals and ensure that workers can understand their way round employment and health & safety law, as well as being a collective group that can bargain with the employer on a bigger platform, and hopefully ensure at the very least safe working conditions and fair pay. Those who work in the public sector (and are thus employed by the government somehow) are more likely to be in a TU than those working in the private sector, which means that the government’s own workers are petitioning the government, and have perhaps some undue influence there. I think that there should be more TUs representing private sector workers, as there is no reason they shouldn’t expect the same standards of work and pay. Sometimes private sector workplaces are better than public sector, but the private sector employee is not usually as secure in their job as a public sector one, which has pros and cons I’m not going into here, as I’m getting completely off point.
So first issue with EM’s election: it’s not a members win, it’s a trade union win, and the vote is distorted by the fact that many people have more than one vote. So the obvious reform here is to change this to 1 member = 1 vote. You can include TU members in this, and just ensure that each name only returns one paper.
Second issue: I just can’t see him as the next prime minister. He doesn’t have a media friendly way somehow, his face is plain weird, which I know is the oddest statement to make, but this ain’t the age of radio anymore. How you look on TV, in the papers and on the internet counts for a lot these days. I’m not saying I can’t be changed on this point, and later think that Ed might well have a chance. I particularly look forward to seeing how he does at PMQs. After the result was announced, Ladbrokes put the odds of the Conservatives winning the 2005 election up, and I’d have agree with them just now. Had David Miliband won, my feeling would have been otherwise. That guy to me had that X factor of what makes a PM, and a media friendly face.
The problem with all this? We’re at the beginning of a long road, it’s another four years and 7 months until the next general election, and all manner of things could happen and will happen in that time. On the other side from Labour is a coalition government which is still finding it’s feet and to some extent always will be. It’s a big experiment in democracy bringing together Conservatives and Liberal Democrats during peace time. Last time we had a coalition government, it was a pragmatic decision where the sides put down their differences in order to come together to win a war. This time it’s a pragmatic decision made to reduce a huge deficit and get round a difficult election result. Or at least I hope it is. I’m a member of the Liberal Democrats, so I’ve had a part to play in this coalition, and now, nearly 5 months later and despite Nick Clegg’s speech in Liverpool, I still have fundamental ideological problems with the fact that my party has helped bring the Tories back into power, because the one thing I’m definitely not, and never could be, is a Conservative. And now in some ways, we are heartbeat away from them.
Bear in mind I’m not a politics student, I really don’t think I’m any kind of expert on political matters and so most of what I’ve just said really isn’t that great. But it’s my two cents anyway.
