Thursday 31 July 2008

Sick

Honestly, I go away for a week and look what happens.

The first time that I have ever dialled 999 for my own benefit. My first ride in an ambulance. Taken out of my house in a wheelchair with a blanket around me and an oxygen mask strapped to my face. Longer in hospital than when I had major surgery earlier in the month.

No Incapacity Benefit, because a very bad former employer not only didn’t pay my wages, but didn’t pay my stamp either (if I’d been signed on then I’d be fine, but I was working so I’m not – there really is no answer to that). No more than two units of alcohol per day until the end of January, while they thin my blood.

But as right as rain by the turn of the year, I’m told. By then, I will doubtless have been punished enough for eating properly, taking regular exercise, drinking in moderation, smoking no more than two or three cigars per year, and never taking an illegal drug.

Anyway, I digress. I go away for a week and look what happens. David Miliband happens. Yes, David Miliband.

He bought a baby on the Internet. But nobody is mentioning that. He only got into Oxford because his super-posh school was nominally part of ILEA, which had a special access scheme effectively controlled by his father. But nobody is mentioning that. His father then got him into the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, clearly at the beck and call of a pro-Soviet fanatic. But nobody is mentioning that.

He has never worked outside politics. But nobody is mentioning that. His predecessor at South Shields was ennobled at the last minute in order that he could be imposed on that safe seat without reference to the Constituency Labour Party. But nobody is mentioning that. Local council candidates there are now chosen by his London office, with no local input at all. But nobody is mentioning that.

He was a staggeringly bad Schools Minister (I repeatedly heard the heavy gasps from Labour and Fabian audiences full of teachers as he displayed just how spectacularly ignorant and incompetent he was, all the while assuming that he was uttering axioms and truisms), mirroring David Cameron’s baleful record as Shadow Education Secretary, during which period the Tories literally had no education policy whatever. But nobody is mentioning that.

His Guardian article is drivel, as everything that he has ever published has been, with an attempt to set out his stall in the last days of Blair eventually accepted by the Daily Telegraph as a joke after the Guardian refused to soil itself by printing it. But nobody is mentioning that. Even his weirdo brother is better. But nobody is mentioning that.

And so one could go on, and on, and on.

Let there be no doubt why the media, and above all the BBC (which tried even after the last minute to draft Miliband last year), are so determined to enthrone him. If they succeed in this, or indeed if Cameron ever becomes Prime Minister (bringing in a Cabinet of at least 19 millionaires, mostly too young to have made it themselves), then no one whose parents had not both the cash and the clout to get them into one of the 50 Oxbridge feeder schools, and who did not proceed seamlessly through Oxbridge to Westminster Village non-jobs for the independently wealthy, will ever again be allowed to become Prime Minister.

The BBC, above all, simply ignored the many perfectly good reasons not to vote Tory in 2001, and instead presupposed that William Hague’s Yorkshire accent was in itself a disqualification from high office. It tore him to pieces accordingly. Its coverage of David Davis’s leadership bid amounted to nothing more than playing over and over again the same footage of a lady falling asleep while he spoke. There have been many other such crimes, not least just after John Smith died.

To Auntie, it is a personal affront that 10 Downing Street is occupied by someone state-schooled and with a non-Oxbridge degree (more than one, in fact), whose Scottishness is decidedly not of the David Cameron variety. So she will stop at nothing to put things right. She will even install David Miliband in his place. Yes, David Miliband.

Don’t let it happen.

15 comments:

  1. David,

    Sorry to hear about your ill-health. Get well soon!

    Charles.

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  2. Cameron is as Scottish as Yvette Cooper and Virginia Bottomley.

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  3. Many thanks, Charles.

    The Aberdonian, do they have their family homes on the Isle of Jura, too? Cameron's other two houses (all three are unmortgaged) are just his MP's London house and his constituency house.

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  4. He also thinks the war on fire to prevent global warming (sorry climate change) is going to sweep Labour into the masses hearts again.

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  5. "Nobody" mentioning? Ho no: on Stumbling anmd Mumbling I deposited the comment:-

    "Pipsqueak Rubberband as the Messiah? Implausible. Still, you've got to admire the way that he proved himself a genuine member of the Forces of Progress. The FoP make it hard to adopt children? Right then, Pipsqueak adopts from the USA. Twice. Rather like Blair using a tutor from Westminster School."

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  6. Thank you, but my comparison with the Blair tutoring hypocrisy might better have been a comparison with Hatty Harbinger sending a nipper to Grammar School.

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  7. David Miliband went to a comprehensive, his dad was a Jewish asylum seeker fleeing the Nazis. You don't get much less privileged than that. Yes, David Miliband!

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  8. He went to Haverstock, one of those schools that are called comprehensives in much the way that some private schools (and a few comps) are called grammar schools for historical reasons.

    Haverstock is (like, say, the London Oratory) one of those half a dozen or so London private schools that have the effrontery to send their bills to the taxpayer, but which are far more difficult to get into than many an institution with no such brass neck.

    No son of the mighty Ralph Miliband's ever went to Grange Hill, and no one from Grange Hill ever went to Oxford by then, although they might have been the intended beneficiaries of the ILEA scheme that took Miliband there.

    But I doubt even that. That scheme, like his school, was a device whereby the upper middle classes could bill the rest of us for the perpetuation of their privileges from one generation to the next.

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  9. David, hope you're on the mend. I enjoyed your post. I also had a bash at him, for what it's worth.

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  10. Many thanks, and keep up the good work.

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  11. David, According to Ofsted, Haverstock is a fairly average (even below average) comprehensive. So I'm not sure where you are getting your info from.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/education/04/school_tables/secondary_schools/html/202_4104.stm

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  12. That's scarcely the point. There are plenty of "fairly average (even below average)" public schools. But look what becomes of their pupils.

    The man is Ralph Miliband's son. Come on, stop pretending that he went to a normal comp. Of course he didn't.

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  13. That nice Mr Noxio with the funny nose linked to this post, so I took a look. Most informative, thank you.

    Isn't it difficult to phone 999 for yourself? I've dialled the number several times when something has kicked off outside my house but had to do it for myself 3 years ago. It had to be indigestion, I thought; I need a little more sleep, I thought; I'm too young for this, I thought; eventually the pain was too much and stubbornness had to relent, but even then it was difficult.

    While waiting (fortunately only 10 minutes) for the ambulance I sat on the stairs thinking "any moment now I'll fart and it will prove to be a false alarm, I'm going to look very silly". A few minutes more and I would have looked very serene.

    In case you were wondering, I survived. I hope you do too, for a long time to come.

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  14. Very many thanks. I'll try my best.

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