In his address to the Labour conference he said he was “up for the fight” and promised he would restore that trust. The party leader claimed he was “an outsider”
This is what counts as being an outsider in today\’s Britain is it?
Born in London, Miliband graduated from the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, becoming first a television journalist and then a Labour Party researcher, before rising to become one of Chancellor Gordon Brown\’s confidants and Chairman of HM Treasury\’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Son of a Marxist intellectual, intern to Tony Benn as a teenager? Some sort of wonky fiddle on inheritance tax and houses which I\’ve still not understood? Apart from that brief (how brief?) time as a TV journo, never actually had a job.
This, this is an outsider these days?
What in buggery did that make Maggie then? Or Heath, Major?
Even Johann bloody Hari has a better claim to have been an outsider.
Leave Hari alone – he’s just misunderstood. You’re obviously homophobic.
The left are always outsiders even we then have been in power for 40-50 years in a row such as in Cuba. It goes together with their good intentions
Emil
Quite, but it’s hardly something exclusive to the left. Look at how the right wing elements of the media constantly champion themselves as the voice of the downtrodden wealthy white middle-classes.
It’s how folk rally the troops. Hell, great football managers like Fergie and Mourinho portray their billionaire elite clubs as victims of, well, *anything*.. because it genders whatever it genders.
It’s not leftist. It’s human.
If you are surrounded by humans and you are a Miliband then of course you feel an outsider.
Claiming to be the Rebel Alliance while wielding inherited power isn’t generally human – it is a feature of post-60’s elites.
Think about Chinese emperors & mandarins, the British aristocracy at its hight, or even orthodox Marxists. All have a founding myth of strength, not weakness.
We have gone from
We rule because God wants us to
to
We rule because we are better and deserve it
to
We will rule because it is historically inevitable
to
We do not rule (honest), and almost certainly never will, because of the huge power of the Thing.
The last of these stands out as a shameless lie.
this is amusingly typical of the type.
You forgot to mention he is the grandson of a Nazi sympathiser. Gramps apparently used to show the Nazis where the Jews were hiding.
Tim adds: I sorta doubt that, as pops and moms were both refugees from the Nazis by reason of being Jewish.
Tim, apologies. I have fact-checked and have discovered that Granddad Sam wasn’t a Nazi sympathiser.
He was a commie soldier in the Red Army under Trotsky’s command in the 1920s.
Tim adds: And since being in hte Red Army of the time or not being in the Red Army of the time was a choice between being alive or shot (umm, you might be shot in it but you’d definitely be shot if you refused to join) I don’t think that carries quite the same opprobrium.
One does rather wish, in retrospect, that Grandpa had taken the moral high-ground.
Don’t we condemn lefties for apologising for what are forebears did – slave trading being a prime example, on the basis that we can’t be held responsible for their sins and they were different moral times?
We can’t have it both ways and start condemning Ed for the sins of his gramps.
SimonF – “Don’t we condemn lefties for apologising for what are forebears did – slave trading being a prime example, on the basis that we can’t be held responsible for their sins and they were different moral times? We can’t have it both ways and start condemning Ed for the sins of his gramps.”
Slavery occurred a long time ago to people who are not around today. Communism happen very recently. People who committed crimes in its name are still alive (and occasionally holding posts at Oxford colleges). I don’t think that Ed’s grandfather did anything to be much ashamed of – they are Polish Jews who fled on both sides, not Russians. But his Father Ralph certainly did. Being a mouthpiece for Stalinist regimes all over the world. Ed has a direct link to his Father in a way that I don’t to any slave plantations. He continues, in a watered down form, his Father’s ideology. If Himmler hadn’t killed his children and they were still working to get a soft-Neo-Nazi party into power we might not be so forgiving. The Left surely wouldn’t. Why should we be for Ed?