In video – David Miliband in South Shields

On the Guardian website today there’s a feature with a video of South Shields MP David Miliband on the campaign trail.  There were a couple of phrases which jumped out.  Loud.

Talking about redundancies

this a different decay coming up than to the last decay

Yes, Labour’s improved decay comes out whiter than the leading competitor, or simply, they’re as shit as the Tories were.

Talking about loss of industry and local shops

they’ve got an ASDA now

‘They’? Fucking THEY?  No ‘we’ or ‘us’.  Nice to feel David’s deeply held commitment to South Shields.  I mean, I feel like he’s a brother, man.  Let’s ignore the fact that shops in the area are now closing due to the new superstore.

Talking about how brilliant we are at exporting fiction

Britain has made itself a leader around the world for causes of human rights, for causes of democracy and for causes of justice.

Or tough on democracy, tough on the causes of democracy.  We cannot call ourselves leaders in any of those fields.  This government has allowed all three to be stripped bare.

Human rights?  David could tell that to the Chagossians, people who he has personally worked to stop returning to their homeland.  Or the victims of torture at the hands of our allies.  Perhaps the many thousands of innocent people now dead or maimed because of British military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Or the Palestinians killed by British made munitions supplied to the occupying Israeli forces.

A leader in the cause of democracy?  Whilst demonstrators aren’t allowed outside OUR fucking parliament to make their case, our own parliament’s upper and lower houses are filled with corporate whores and unelected busybodies making policy and law not for the people, but for their paymasters and gods, and casting aside our civil liberties in favour of profit and ever more control.  And while they are raping our democracy they are claiming expenses from us to do it.

Our own electoral system is being soiled by a developing three party system, a bastard child of the US system, cheered on by a media incestuously bound with the political elite.

Justice?  Where is the justice of dodgy billionaires and practitioners of woo silencing investigative journalism and reasonable criticism with all the brute force of England’s rich man libel laws?  What justice is served by super-injunctions or the silencing of the Al-Yamamah investigations? Where’s the justice in allowing religious special interests their very own opt out on civil rights?

There’s loads more to cover, but so little time.

Note

If you take a peek at the comments below the video you’ll see local Tory candidate Karen Allen got her oar in, albeit a bit pathetically. This could have been a monumental opportunity, sadly lost.

Letter: Ashcroft taxing for Allen

Tory candidate Karen Allen misses the real concerns many people have over the Conservative Party funding, courtesy of multi-millionaire Michael Ashcroft (Have Your Say, March 15).  The secrecy behind which the Tories sought to shroud the issue; why it took ten years for the tax abroad Lord to come clean over his tax status, especially as both William Hague and David Cameron had been dodging answering the questions.  Is it more than coincidence that Ashcroft spilled the beans only just before the information was going to be made public anyway?

Any ambiguity could have been cleared up to everyone’s satisfaction if Ashcroft and other senior Tories had agreed to be interviewed in person by the Electoral Commission.  Instead they refused to comply with the Electoral Commission’s requests and stayed away, much to the Commission’s frustration.

Indeed, rather than the ‘clean bill of health’ that Karen Allen claims, the conclusions of the Electoral Commission’s report read more like the Scottish law verdict of ‘not proven’ than a resounding not guilty.

The suspicion that the Tories find the whole episode an embarrassment and want the story to go away was further strengthened when Tory MPs boycotted the standards inquiry into the Ashcroft peerage.

From the saddle of her moral high horse Karen Allen points to Labour’s non-dom peers, but the ‘they did it so can we’ defence sounds like the politics of the trough, not a party with a ‘clean bill of health’ laying claim to electoral propriety.

Published in the Shields Gazette today.  With some editing.