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The wit and wisdom of Dr John Reid

In the two years that Dr John Reid (aka Baron Reid of  Cardowan) has been Chairman of Celtic Football Club, he seems to have been honing his skills at putting the boot in. Today, on the BBC’s Daily Politics show hosted by Andrew Neil, he managed to put the boot into three Labour Leaders — Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and his former boss, Neil Kinnock (to whom he was a political advisor).

Of Gordon Brown, he said:

from 2007 onwards when Blair went, we just lost our way.  We had a complete lack of strategic direction.  And that’s why we suffered the biggest parliamentary loss in our history.

Of Ed Miliband, when he said the era of New Labour has passed, he said:

I don’t think he understands New Labour quite frankly, because you see what I’ve never understood is the statement ‘we need to renew ourselves, therefore we have to abandon New Labour’. The fundamental principle of New Labour was what Tony called ‘constant renewal’, what I call ‘permanent revisionism’.

And of Neil Kinnock’s remark (on the election of Ed Miliband) that ‘we’ve got our party back‘, he said:

pretty offensive hey? Given that the party that we had back had, unlike any other Labour Government, served 3 successful terms, had pooled the biggest number of supporters and party members at one stage we’d ever had,  had done a lot of good things and I think a lot of people were kinda offended at that remark.

With friends like these…

A transcript of much of the programme is here or you can (for a while) view the programme here.

2 Comments

  1. Steve Kelly says:

    As the old saying goes – sour grapes methinks

  2. Ian says:

    All I can say about John Reid is, let the dead bury the dead.
    Good bye John, its been emotional!!

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