What political leader in Opposition has ever stopped in its tracks what looked like irresistible momentum towards a disaster? No, I can’t think of one either.
Certainly not Cameron – can you remember any of the positions he took during the 5 years before the 2010 election, apart from slyly posing beside a dog-sleigh in the Arctic? Nor Blair, except his flying off to Hayman Island off Australia to pay sycophantic homage to Murdoch’s News International just before the 1997 election. Not even Thatcher who spent 4 undistinguished years as Tory Opposition Leader 1975-9 and failed to leave any mark whatever on the tumultuous struggles of the late 1970s.
Yet Ed Miliband has now twice outmanoeuvred some of the most powerful forces in the land and forced the government on to a humiliating defensive. By any standards, given the lack of executive power, that is a stunning tactical and strategic achievement. Continue reading
It’s week six of the Leveson inquiry, and I for one have stopped following the details. The precise circumstances in which Piers Morgan got to hear recordings of conversations between Heather Mills and Paul McCartney is a topic that will fascinate few of us.
No journalist worth his or her salt should rejoice in the downfall of another. There are plenty of commentators in particular that I could name who infuriate me, who have in fact infuriated for me for years, or who I have had real spats with. I would be disappointed if some of them didn’t feel the same about me. One of the reasons I was so overjoyed to be moving to the United States five years ago was to escape the so called ‘Westminster belt way’ of journalists I christened the ‘commentariat’. I hope that I will not be accused of plagiarising when I make that claim, but to the best of my knowledge it was me. 
The Murdoch phone-hacking frenzy morphing into a far bigger picture of elite corruption in Britain is now in full spate. The country is ruled by a closed network between banks and international finance, mega-corporations, the small clique round No.10, an aggressive media, and an indifferent police/MI5 security system. Every one of them has now been corrupted by the collapse of regulation and accountability which has accompanied, indeed gave birth to, the neoliberal capitalism founded on the premise that government was bad and unfettered markets and deregulation of almost all controls was the best way to run societies. It was the best way for elites to run society because they increasingly got their way on everything and moulded a society in their own image, while employing oodles of PR and media consultants to persuade everyone elese that it was really in their interests too. The results being slowly uncovered show how far Britain has steadily transmuted from democracy into oligarchy. 
