Sunday 12 June 2011

Treasures Old And New

In the middle of the week, I saw a debate on television featuring Chuka Umunna, Lord Oakeshott, and someone called Matthew Hancock, who I believe was given a safe seat too late for the local party to have any real say in the matter, as a present from his special friend George Osborne. Ah, those public schools, you know...

Anyway, we may leave aside anyone who imagines that Osborne is a figure of the slightest consequence. Ummuna was good, but it was Oakeshott, initially a member of this Coalition, who actually called for the paper fiction of UKFI to be discontinued. Quite right, too, since UKFI itself has said it, pretty much in so many words: no one is ever going to want to buy the nationalised banks, so they are going to be in public ownership for ever.

Once a Chocolate Soldier, always a Chocolate Soldier, it seems. Even if it was in the office of Roy Jenkins, with consequences for future party membership. Not only should Ed Miliband be promising to call a spade a spade by abolishing the silly, Blairy UKFI, one of New Labour's numerous throwbacks to John Major's "next-step agencies". He should also, including on that sort of basis, be reaching out to the many Old Labour types in the Lords and elsewhere whom the tides of ancient history have washed up in the Lib Dems, if anywhere.

Nothing would better signal the defeat of those who were Communists and Trotskyists in those days, and who hijacked the Labour Party after John Smith died. An ideal job, perhaps, for Chuka Umunna.

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