Battle of the Milibands

Just a bit of fun today, with a small moral thrown in as usual. The Miliband brothers, those paradigms of middle class war, ie those who are the very people the workers, under Marx, Engels and Lenin, would have either imprisoned or beheaded, are both involved in promoting a watered down version of the exact politics which would both take away what they have and under a less watered down version a lot more as well. It's not even ironic that many of the world's richest people are the most ardent socialists, as my old friend Toby Young pointed out, he became a Tory when his father used to sit discussing the destruction of the class struggle over vintage wine before driving home in their Rolls Royce.

Hypocrisy wasn't ever part of the seven deadly sins, or lying from memory, and really seven may be just about the maximum possible for most people to remember, but they really needed to be thorough and make a sampler for everyone to keep if necessary rather than leave out some essentials. Back to the brothers, being someone who would invite Labour into government as much as I'd invite cockroaches into my kitchen, if they remade Attila the Hun or Stalin to run for leadership I'd care no more than Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, or anyone named Miliband (assuming the family is larger still). As they are all standing under the same platform of wealth and growth removal, then choosing a party who spin themselves as 'caring', and do so by removing every possible incentive for improving ones life, means if you also become as rich and successful as the Milibands they'd take it back off you. In fact it's only because the British are not that stupid that rather than stick to their old ways as they did in the 70s, Labour had to water down the most obvious trademark of organised criminality, high income tax, when Tony Blair got in in order to maintain more than single terms of power, getting kicked out every time the country was taken too far left. Of course he ripped us off in less obvious ways by working out devious methods to maintain the income, such as flight tax, insurance tax and the greatest of all, carbon taxes. The left never stop taking, they just find better ways of hiding it.

Back to the terrible two, the debate over which Miliband is best is to me is like asking if you'd prefer brown dogshit trodden on your carpet or yellow. It's not a fucking debate! Of course the Labourites see it as one of the greatest questions since who would win last year's X Factor final, but as an outsider I'd put my own take on the pair of what can only be described as crap and crappier. Now technically Ed Miliband has become the real life stock film skit where the top job accidentally goes to a random person who has to spend the rest of the film trying to live up to it while no one believes they are not really that person. He is the kid we all took the piss out of at school. He was probably the model for the term 'spazz' (had he travelled back to the 60s in a time machine anyway), and although his actual policies themselves would have Britain back where it was maybe just before the industrial revolution, that is only because he has adopted many genuine Labour policies from pre-Blair, although since his coronation has mixed and matched a bit (seriously pissing off his union sponsors in the process) as presumably his advisors know such policies are what lost them every single election in the past for going that far left. But as a person he guarantees whichever party he leads will lose, so anyone with an eye to see (you only even need one to do so) outside their supporters is praying they stick tightly to their guns and don't dump him before the election. Technically if the unions elected him, being a minority nowadays who no one would dream of returning to a position of national power like the dire 70s, he never represented the mainstream Labour anyhow, but the union power is still great enough within their bastard child the Labour Party then that is the last place their say goes.

But having chosen him as at the time (although as I said not so much now) he was a supposed adherent of traditional Labour, despite having as much in common with factory and railway workers as he does with Zulu warriors. They still have the other old Labour trait of everyone in their place, and thus still looking up to the middle class intellectuals, much as Oliver Twist tried to get more from Mr Bumble. It's only a modern version of feudalism, the lords and masters still living like kings while the workers get the crumbs, only under Labour they do all they can to bring the middle classes down as well (while of course doing anything and everything it takes not to lose their own wealth). But the end result was the old minority (in numbers but clearly not in power) rump of old Labour won the day, and elected their man, over the polished and no doubt empty shell of brother David, who actually both knew what he was doing and how to present himself. Labour (as any other party) would have won because he was leader regardless of his policies, although people forget in this country the party is the general driver of the decisions and the leader only guides it slightly one or the other direction they prefer it to, although nowadays it's almost irrelevant as most law is imposed from the EU whoever's in.

So the two Milibands would deliver a very slightly different version of Labour policies, just as changing a minister or few does the same thing. They are only warts on the same arse, yet people see them as independent individuals able to think and act for themselves, despite being part of the hydra they call party politics, which sends its tentacles so widely around the members in the end they can barely move without the following of everyone else. Of course this applies to all the main parties, but never more than these two contrasting individuals with barely recognisable differences in practice. The difference between poor Ed stumbling over his speeches and poking playground responses to every single action of the government and his smooth and slick brother, who gives marvellous speeches and (although we'll never actually know now) probably thought out and cutting responses to the government. But either of them would make barely any noticeable difference to the country had they got in at the next election. Nowadays the difference between the actual parties is so slim it's only a matter of where to set the maximum band of income tax (probably within a 10% band), and how many millions of immigrants they let in, so expecting which leader within a party itself to make any more difference than their figurehead presentation, which may make them many friends abroad and win heaps of votes, still treads dogshit on our carpets.

Which Miliband? Neither.