robertcrozier.net

Ed Miliband, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of the Labour leader in opposition, namely the ability to oppose every policy put in place to rectify the enormous debts that your party ran up when in power. You’ve spoken in Hyde Park today about how you propose to cut the deficit in half as an ‘alternative’ to the actions of the coalition but fail to state where the £14billion worth of cuts your party promised this financial year would fall. Who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were advising the previous Labour government as a minister and Gordon Brown’s 2nd most favourite ‘son’ during the time when Britain ran large deficits during the boom years? Perhaps you would have more moral authority if you did indeed provide a real alternative instead of vacuousness and poor, pale imitation (the fact you compared your ‘struggle’ to that of Martin Luther King, the Suffragettes and that of apartheid) of great figures of the past. Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the counties and the shires of this country if the United Kingdom were not facing the highest ‘peacetime’ (we are involved in Afghanistan and Libya) deficit in our history thanks to the policies you argued for and supported prior to the greatest bust in 70 years?

The truth, Ed Miliband, is that you have run out of ideas. Your hypocrisy knows no bounds. You practice the politics of division by pretending that the country can go on as before spending money like there’s no tomorrow with no thought to the consequences. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child. Now, once again today you deny the fact that if this country’s finances are not put on a sustainable path, the interest on our debts would rise resulting in the need for even greater cuts in the near future; you spoke about how you would cut slower and shallower, even though you campaigned on a manifesto based on cuts ‘deeper than those of Thatcher’ (copyright Mr Darling). Well, it is true that there is an alternative. We can follow your recipe and end up in the same position as Ireland and perhaps Portugal. The path that you, the Leader of the opposition, espouse is to run the risk of default on our debts and have the IMF make the decisions about cuts in our country much like the last time Labour bankrupted the country. In the Republic of Ireland, public sector workers are not having their pay frozen, it is being cut. Social workers have had their monthly wages slashed by €300… PER MONTH in the last year alone. As leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, Iain Gray is just the leader of the MSP group in thrall to your instructions, you now support the offering of free everything, education, council tax freezes, keeping A&Es open, with no explanation of what will be cut to pay for those promises. Yet again you are not being honest with the electorate in Scotland just are you are not being honest with the UK as a whole. Now, it’s not that you don’t believe your own hubris; you do; but like most rational people I have now realised after today’s little effort that you’re incapable of anything other than cheap student level politicking. You can’t actually believe what your speech writers and spin doctors told you to say, because if you do then you are not fit to ever be the Prime Minister of this country.

Mr Miliband, you cannot carry on denying the deficit or your part in its expansion and then propose to squeeze the productive bit of the economy to pay for your mistakes. You cannot evoke Keynesian spending in the bad times when you didn’t implement Keynesian saving in the good times. And when you repeat, in that faux outrage voice you put on that the coalition is going ‘too fast and too deep’ in returning spending to 2007 levels, yes that’s right ‘the height of the boom’ 2007 levels; when you yourself compare your economically illiterate and deeply divisive rhetoric on spending reductions to the true giants of peoples’ movements the world over; I have to tell you that you sound like a poor man’s Neil Kinnock telling a rally ‘We’re aaaaarrigghhhtt!’. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense! Everyone knows that Britain needs to pay its way in the world, that we are not like the United States of America, the world’s reserve currency, and we cannot borrow billions to our heart’s content and at the low interest rates we currently enjoy thanks to the Chancellor’s strong deficit reduction plan. The IMF agrees, the European Commission agrees; the markets agree – which why our debt interest repayment has remained at £120million a day and not risen as it would if you had your way. While you don’t give the people of the UK a smidgen of honesty about what your party would cut, your party will be branded irrelevant while the grown-ups get on with sorting out the mess you helped create. And soon the voters too will get their chance to say so. They will see your hypocrisy and your lack of policy: they will see that you are the morally bankrupt leader of a bankrupt party.

The more alert of you will recognise the structure of this piece belongs to Daniel Hannan MEP. So a big thanks to his writing skills educating my own.