Ed must go ?

So the media 'let's get rid of Miliband (Ed)' train has well and truly left the station.

Our experience of these kind of media campaigns is that, once they are up and running, it is almost impossible to stop them. They become part of the political agenda and lazy political journalists will simply resort to the theme over and over again for want of seeking out any original stories.

Let's dump.....whoever campaigns are debilitating things. They must take up a huge amount of the time of the victim and his/her advisers. They sap political will and take attention away from real political issues - the ones that people actually care about.

But this is now a serious problem for Ed Miliband and Labour. Does the party dump him now to give themselves plenty of time to recover lost ground, or do they hang on with ever more damaging consequences? It is, of course, a disgrace that the media should hound someone out of office on such flimsy evidence, but they do; that is the world we live in.

The flimsy evidence is not good. As someone recently said (was it a Times or Observer editorial ?) the Archbishop of Canterbury is currently looking like a more effective leader of the opposition. A managerial aproach to opposition won't work. The passion of the Archbishop's words was most telling. Ed lacks passion - of course he does. He is an academic social democrat. Politics needs to be more visceral when you are in opposition. The issues facing Labour now are about growing poverty, deprivation, inequality, unemployment and fear of unemployment. These are not intellectual issues. They are real and they are moral.

Unfortunately for Labour the main alternative is Ed's brother and that kind of handover would be equally disastrous. Labour seems to be stuck wih its own managerial political class and lacks any real options. Talk about creeks and lack of a paddle !

Nevertheless if I were Labour I think I'd do the dumping now.







http://www.hoddereducation.co.uk/Colleges/Government---Politics.aspx?mRef=CNM01.