Voting for Ed Miliband
After four days following the Pope around, I am back in the near-secular world, convinced that faith has still a party to play, along with reason, in our society, just as the newly beatified Cardinal Newman always hoped for.
First on the agenda- opening a backlog of mail. I find, inter alia, a Christmas catalogue from my favourite charity CAFOD, unsolicited mail from my local Pizza take away and Sushi bar up the hill, and a plethora of material from Labour party leadership candidates begging for my allegiance.
Well, I know ballots are secret and all that, but I’m happy to declare my preference for Ed Miliband as Labour party leader, and the return of Ken Livingstone as Labour’s London mayoral candidate. The older Miliband was not bad as foreign secretary (although not half as ethical as Robin Cooke), and has projected himself as a safe pair of hands. Ed Balls is an old FT colleague and knows how to play a tough game of football. I would like to see him back in the Treasury one day. Andy Burnham likes my book on Barca and is a fellow Catholic and seems a genuine sort of Northerner. I like the way Diane Abbot speaks her mind, has a sense of humour, and has no personal government experience haunting her.
Over at the Mayor’s Office, Boris seems to be acting the same way as he has done ever since I first met him as a young trainee reporter, when he was at the Times and I on the Labour staff of the FT were covering a seamen’s strike. I had to explain to Boris what a court sequestration of union assets meant under a Conservative government, (it broke the union)and thereafter he never forgot the favour, offering to invite me to a full English breakfast at a subsequent Conservative party conference years later , and, more recently, agreeing to open a beautiful Winter Garden in my favourite London park early in 2011.
Boris has an acerbic wit which I find a huge relief from the cantankerous waffle enunciated by many politicians. But one of his best ideas so far-bringing more bikes onto London’s streets- was pinched from Ken, and somehow London has lost its cosmopolitan popular feel since he took over. My foreign side (I am half Spanish after all) finds Boris too often playing the part of a quintessentially English eccentric from a privileged backround who will never really understand how it really feels to be a darker shade of pale when the chips are down.
Turning to the alternative Labour mayoral candidate Oona King , I find her a genial enough person, who is intelligent to boot, but she allowed herself to be politically outmaneovered and beaten in her own London constituency by George Galloway and I can’t quite see her managing to hold the metropolis l together during the Olympics, when challenges to the capital could range from underfunded transport chaos to an attempted or-God forbid- successful terrorist attack taking advantage of a demoralised police force.
So back to the other Ed, the one that get my vote. Why? I think the labour party needs a good shake-up before it goes to the country again with an alternative vision of government once the good of people of this land have rraelised that only Keynes can really save us from the mess we are in. Labour’s leadership and party workers needs to regain a reputation that they really care about the most needy and vulnerable, and are responsive to what really constitutes the common good- fair taxation, the best Health Service in the world, a safe and fair environment, decent housing and education for all and the conduct of all domestic and foreign affairs in a way that values life and respects others people’s faiths. I don’t want a government that necessarily ‘does God’ but has its heart in the right place. It needs to set aside gimmickry and spin, and become the party in which a majority of voters can genuinely put their trust . It has to be the party with genuine substance.
I wavered between the two Miliband brothers, and couldn’t resist, in the end putting Balls as my second choice and Burnham as my third just to help Ed along a bit more. What swung me in the end towards Labour’s most seriously radical candidate in the number 1 slot was the sight of Nick Clegg , playing , once again, to the cameras, while behaving like Cameron’s spokesman, at a conference that called itself Liberal Democrat but heard nothing of real weight or distinction from a deputy prime-minister. This was Clegg blatantly attempting to emulate Tony Blair’s once vote catching style before his failed judgements as a politician sunk in. This country deserves better than that.
