Ed Miliband

[Section_31]

To me, he's cut from the same cloth as Cameron and Clegg. He's only different because of his hair colour. Same primped up born to be as them all.

 

Ed? I don't think he is at all. He did the whole PPE thing but he went to a comp and is the son of parents who fled the Holocaust. His dad was a Marxist.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Ed? I don't think he is at all. He did the whole PPE thing but he went to a comp and is the son of parents who fled the Holocaust. His dad was a Marxist.

 

I've been patient with his start to Labour leadership, the last few days have left me wondering what the fuck he is doing.

[Section_31]

I've been patient with his start to Labour leadership, the last few days have left me wondering what the fuck he is doing.

 

He's just too wet for the job. He seems sharp and he's probably a decent bloke, but he's just not a leader and he has no conviction. He wouldn't interupt you if you were having a political or philisophical debate at a dinner party, put it that way, and that's a problem.

[bossy]

He's never done anything other than politics bar a brief spell in TV. He went to Oxford, pretty normal political leadership resume.

Regardless, he seems unable to inspire and all great leaders do that. I hope for our sakes he becomes effective.

[King Emlyn]

He's a fucking disaster, we all know it, there's nothing more to be said. Get rid, and get rid now.

[Anubis]

He's a fucking disaster, we all know it, there's nothing more to be said. Get rid, and get rid now.

 

The more I listen to him, the more I'm forced to concur.

[dennis tooth]

Is it just me or does there seem to be a really dearth in potential leaders in that party? I think Miliband seems a decent enough fella and I actually agree that he's not done too bad against Cameron PMQs recently, but I think it's a case of his face not fitting and the media capitalising on this. To be fair, I don't think he's helped himself at times with the whole 'squeezed middle' shite he's been peddling as the country burns and he's obviously not helped by the murmurings in his own party, but he'll never be PM in a million years.

 

The obvious electable candidate is David, but he just strikes me as 'Blair Lite', to be honest.

 

I was scratching my head today who I could envisage as a Labour leader, and the only one who filled me with any real confidence was Chuka Umunna; who has really impressed me whenever I've seen him on Question Time. His age obviously counts against him though and I couldn't see him getting the gig for a few years. I'd like to see him throw his name into the hat if Miliband was ever ousted, however.

 

The system is set up to produce such mongs though, garbage in, garbage out.

 

Theres people around but they get marginalised by the system.

[silverlining]

Ed Milliband is unelectable. As any fule kno.

 

Politics is show biz for ugly people.

[dennis tooth]

Yeah Obama is shit tooo ya know. Dont want any of these cretins. AJ is a bollock dropping middle class bastard.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Yeah Obama is shit tooo ya know. Dont want any of these cretins.

 

I wasn't advocating it, I'm just saying that's what Labour needs if it is going to win an election. It needs somebody who'll make grand speeches and talk big and tell us how amazing we are: 'you put the Great in Great Britain' and all that shit.

 

Empty rhetoric express.

[clangers]

The system is set up to produce such mongs though, garbage in, garbage out.

 

Theres people around but they get marginalised by the system.

 

The system now more than ever has a political class. An individual goes to university to study politics, from there they work as a political researcher either for a policy unit or MP before going on to work as a private secretary to an MP and finally being elected as an MP themselves.

 

We've spent much of the last 20 years stripping away outside roles for MP's, no one is going to argue that we shouldn't have done something about Tory MP's sitting with 53 directorships or Labours MP's spending days working for business and unions themselves but we've driven out people with real world skills and backgrounds from representing us in the process. Where are the union leaders or genuine entrepeneurs? Hell how about MP's with successful backgrounds in science? We have an all time low number of MP's with any kind of scientific or engineering background.

 

We've ended up with a politico class taking decisions they actually don't have the slightest understanding of and even worse have no real idea of what it's like to work.

[richard1982]

yesterday showed what a lame duck milliband is. a decent opposition leader would have used yesterdays multi union strike to hammer the govt. but, because he cant be seen as being 'cosy' with the unions he condemed them. leaving him with a bi election win in a labour safe seat in scotland as his only weapon against the govt.

 

we need a decent opposition, and we need it now. milliband is not the man for the job.

[dennis tooth]

Labour are not the answer full stop, its tempting to just get a vocal leader who wil spout a lot of stuff people want to hear even if Labour did want that which they dont and never will. Its not the answer though.

As long as people are docile though they will continue to vote for being fucked over. People need to take responsibility for their freedoms and put it to use.

Its not enough to take baby steps anymore, in the future people will hopefully look back at capitalism as a primitive form if we ever get out of it without wiping ourselves out.

People act as if it can never be improved up and we should never try because they are made to think that way by the system. We are not trying hard enough to even acknowledge there is a problem, everyone is too busy trying to claim the travelator like Eunice Huthart. Thats what those at the top are telling them to do, then sending the political class out to say 'you will go on my first whistle' etc

 

Its the system, its designed to filter real people who might threaten it out and those that laud it will do well, those that see things in all their colour and complexity will be rooted to the spot and those that see everything in black and white and give the answer everyone wants to hear but is the wrong answer will do well. All professions suffer from this a lot in capitalism when there is no objective scientific measure of performance but an objective social one that can be manipulated either deliberately or in a more random spiral.

[Section_31]

Someone should start a political party on Facebook, completely virtual where people are encouraged to vote via a blanket email. The GF should start one. We could write a manifesto and some of y'all can be mods. We spread the word among our various friends and contacts and find a way to give it credibility.

[dennis tooth]

Someone should start a political party on Facebook, completely virtual where people are encouraged to vote via a blanket email. The GF should start one. We could write a manifesto and some of y'all can be mods. We spread the word among our various friends and contacts and find a way to give it credibility.

 

I'm sure we'd all suprise ourselves if that ever happend. We are told to be apathetic about it all

[Mr. Beast]

he really is rather shit. someone compared this before to a hostage video...

BBC News - Ed Miliband: 'These strikes are wrong'

[Section_31]

he really is rather shit. someone compared this before to a hostage video...

BBC News - Ed Miliband: 'These strikes are wrong'

 

Fucking hell, I know it's BBC but is that legit? He repeats himself exactly - exactly word for word no less than five times in two and a half minutes. Are we sure this isn't some kind of Armando Iannucci thing?? Unreal.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Yeah, it's real. Sounds like a total cunt. That said, Osborne did exactly the same thing:

 

Watch: Osborne repeats himself 4 times in intvw | Liberal Conspiracy

[dirty_sanchez]

Imagine what Malcolm Tucker would say to him after that.

[Mr. Beast]

His advisers need to realise he can't eat someone elses' shit and sell it - he's not Tony Blair. His face is a bit wonky and the papers will slaughter him either way but let him say what he wants, there isn't really much choice. It probably won't be that radical and the public might actually respond.

[Stu Monty]

he really is rather shit. someone compared this before to a hostage video...

BBC News - Ed Miliband: 'These strikes are wrong'

 

Sweet baby Jesus, what a fucking vacuum of personality he is there.

 

Are we absolutely sure that wasn't a robot that was broken and on a misfiring loop?

 

Have we long since passed the point of having leaders and are now fully committed to having followers? By that I mean MPs and PMs that run the country based on focus polls of swing seats. Where are the ideas? Where is the desire not to target a demography that believes something by agreeing with them but by dragging them round to your beliefs and values through oration and logic.

 

Pathetic stuff.

[dennis tooth]

Clearly Nueve I think you backed the wrong man.

This man is reading off a script someone else has written, his real bosses.

[Sugar Ape]

he really is rather shit. someone compared this before to a hostage video...

BBC News - Ed Miliband: 'These strikes are wrong'

 

After watching that I could quite happily repeatedly punch him in the face. That is absolutely fucking awful. The country is fucked.

[richard1982]

he really is rather shit. someone compared this before to a hostage video...

BBC News - Ed Miliband: 'These strikes are wrong'

 

modern politics at work. both this and the osborne video. just repeat the same answer, no matter what the question, until the answer becomes a soundbite that can be used on the 10 o'clock news later.

 

the travisty in this is: where are the journalists to pull these career polititians up on it, no mention of it on that bbc page.

[kelster]

Udh6w5r0bOA

 

The Damon Green interview boiled down to 20 seconds. An absolute disgrace of a leader. Him and Cameron pretty much sum up everything that is wrong with modern politics and why most people couldn't give a fuck.

 

To a TV reporter, political PRs can seem incredibly fussy, often to the point where it takes vast tact and patience not to pick them up bodily and hurl them off the nearest tall building with a joyful shout. Common sense, they say: you could be laying a trap, hiding a loaded question, trying to make us look silly. But occasionally a politician needs no help at all to look silly. And that is how it turned out with Ed Miliband yesterday.

 

Buggins’ turn for me was a round of interviews at Westminster, hoovering up political reaction to the public sector strikes. Ministers drift like smoke around the corridors of 4, Millbank where the broadcasters have their offices, and you grab them on the stairs or the landing. We found Francis Maude and he said his piece obligingly, but we had to be quick: at nine was a sit-down interview with Ed at his office in Portcullis House and we scampered across to find him. The interview was a `pool’ arrangement - to be shared by the three main broadcasters to save time and resources - and I’d been named to do it for ITV News.

 

There is an etiquette involved in pooling, which everyone understands. Ask the obvious question, and get the obvious answer. Don’t try to be too clever or esoteric, either with your questioning or your camerawork. Make sure the material is usable by everyone (reporters: stay out of shot) and relay it as soon as the interview is done.

 

To me it seemed simple enough. But I hadn’t bargained with the team of three handlers waiting for me in the Opposition Leader’s office.

They demand control of the interview location. Well… OK, we are in Ed’s office, fair enough. They want him in front of his bookcase, with his family photos over his left shoulder. Er… sure, is he going to be long? We are running late.

 

It isn’t that unusual for political PRs to demand control over the composition of an interview shot. I gather that David Cameron’s people will never let him be filmed in front of anything expensive, or ornate, or strikingly Etonian. But it isn’t until our shot has been checked by all three press officers – all peering into our viewfinder and offering helpful advice about framing and depth of field (a term they turned out not to understand, as my cameraman Peter Lloyd-Williams triumphantly established) that we turn to the topic: `What questions are you going to ask?’

 

I hate being asked that. Partly, because it is none of their business. But mostly, if I am honest, because I don’t really know. I don’t have an interview `technique’, and this lack of technique has been honed constantly since my earliest days of not using it at the Bermondsey News. Its absence never troubled me until yesterday. You see, getting a `grab’ for a television report is a simple enough business. You say the first thing that comes into your head. The interviewee responds with the first thing that comes into his head. And you take it from there. Almost like, well, a conversation.

 

But when your interviewee has only one answer, and repeats it back to you whatever you say, things go downhill very fast.

 

Ed Miliband thinks that the strikes are wrong at a time when negotiations are still underway. The government has acted in a reckless and provocative manner, but it is time for both sides to set aside the rhetoric and get around the negotiating table and stop this from happening again.

 

I know this because he told me six times. His PR must have known that was what he was going to do. And yet he still went through a convincing charade of pressing me on my line of interrogation, urging me to keep my questions brief, and even – this was a macabre touch – placing a voice recorder on the table beside me as a kind of warning not to try and misquote his boss.

 

As it turned out, the first take was drowned out by a passing siren on the Embankment, but seemed like a thoughtful and precise position for a Labour leader to take. Clear in his condemnation, hopeful of a negotiated settlement. Not partisan, but engaged. Detached, but not aloof.

The second time it seemed like a less original statement. The strikes are wrong… the rhetoric has gone too far… parents across the country…But then, I’d heard it before and it was useful to have a clean version, unspoiled by a siren.

 

The third time… the third time I was struggling a little bit. I’d asked him how his opposition to the strikes fitted with his position as leader of the Labour movement. I thought it was quite a clever question. Silly me. The strikes were wrong at a time when negotiations were still underway. The government had acted recklessly. It was time for rhetoric to be set aside.

Some reporters like to have their questions written on a piece of paper, and tick them off one by one as they are asked. It’s something I’ve never done, but at this moment I wished fervently that I had a piece of paper in my hand, just to give me something to look at, and scratch away thoughtfully just buy some time.

 

I asked another question. Something about Francis Maude, and his tone of conciliation. Not very good, I know, but the best I could manage. Get him to say something about Francis Maude, I was thinking… his hairstyle, his glasses, the way he peers over the top of them as he drones on, anything, just stop already with the strikes are wrong while negotiations are underway, and the rhetoric has got out of hand…

 

I’m not sure what I asked next. Frankly I was in danger of losing it. On my own, with the eyes of Ed Miliband and his three handlers boring into me but apparently oblivious of my presence, I was getting twinges of what I can only describe as existential doubt. So I said some words. And Ed told me that the strikes were wrong, and the rhetoric was out of hand, and both sides needed to sit down…

 

That was the worst one, I think.

 

If news reporters and cameras are only there to be used by politicians as recording devices for their scripted soundbites, at best that is a professional discourtesy. At worst, if we are not allowed to explore and examine a politician’s views, then politicians cease to be accountable in the most obvious way. So the fact that the unedited interview has found its way onto YouTube in all its absurdity, to be laughed at along with all the clips of cats falling off sofas, is perfectly proper.

 

Afterwards, I was overcome with a feeling of shame. I couldn’t look him in the eye.

 

But before I dried up completely, and had to be led out of Westminster with my mouth opening and shutting, I had an opportunity to ask one last question. I had an urge to say something so stupid, so flippant that he would either have to answer it, or get up and leave. `What is the world’s fastest fish?’ `Can your dog do tricks?’ `Which is your favourite dinosaur?’ But, of course, this was a pool interview, and I had no wish to feed out the end of my television career to Sky and the BBC.

 

I realise now, of course, the perfect question to ask, to embarrass him and to keep my job. I should have asked was whether the strikes were wrong, whether the rhetoric had got out of hand, and whether it was time for both sides to get round the negotiating table before it happened again.

Because that was the only answer I ever got.

Edited July 1, 2011 by kelster