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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Tories goes on the offensive with a personal attack against Ed Miliband – but is this the right approach?
We saw last autumn how the Labour leader was able to turn the Daily Mail attacks on Miliband’s father into a positive and that could happen this time.
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as if anybody can choose who their father is....
I also think that negative lines, whilst potentially effective, should be done at arms length. I agree that this is unwise.
However, Labour have no room for complaint given their despicable 'absolutely bloody brilliant' ideas.
But then again, remember when the Labour party personalised it against Andrew Mitchell?
http://www.libdemvoice.org/the-labour-party-plebgate-website-they-no-longer-want-you-to-see-36756.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/10657721/Scottish-independence-Alex-Salmond-reveals-currency-Plan-B.html
The Tories want to fight an election on class war, on millionaire privileged elites.....ha ha BRING IT ON!!
I wonder if there's a wider strategy here, linked to the stories in the Mail about NCCL and leading labour figures.
Anyway, Labour are not ahead in the polls and on course to form the next Government because of Ed Miliband but because of Labour. It's is the LABOUR PARTY that people trust and believe in to deliver for them and their families more than the other parties.
Weird very weird almost politically suicidal move by the Tories to focus on wealth, prvilige and politics of the party Leaders!
All the tories are doing is questioning the credentials of Ed Miliband to fight a class war. It's not as if he's working class.
It's implementation is rather ill judged and begs to be fired back.
However, this particular personal attack is rather feeble. It should be binned.
Well Labour allows it if your parents are already highly connected (e.g. the Milibands or Harman), or if you become a union official early on. Otherwise it looks much harder to go down the Nick Palmer route, although even he had non-ordinary schooling. To do well, you have to appear part of the club.
School connections obviously matter to the Conservatives, but they also have a fair few ex-manual workers - including a miner. It seems that it helps to have run a business or otherwise found a way to make money. To do well, you have to appear part of the club.
In both the Conservatives and Labour, connections can be massively important.
As for the Lib Dems: being male seems to help there ...
In truth, there seems precious little difference between all three parties. I therefore propose one party where it might be easiest to become a politician from an 'ordinary' background: UKIP.
edit: the above is slightly tongue in cheek ...
viewcode said:
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May I suggest that the senior SNP personnel, whilst clever and successful politicians and perfectly nice people, do not actually know how to administer an independent state?
The Irish, following their war of independence and *during* a destructive civil war, managed to construct a functional civil service, police service, prison service, border control, government, legislature, judiciary, tax collection, ambassadorial accreditation to all the counties of the world, every appurtenance of a modern state, within about six years of independence. Even if they had to tie the punt to the pound, they still managed to do it.
Wheras the SNP senior staff think Scotland is in the EU (it isn't), the Commonwealth (it isn't), don't need a central bank (you really do) nor an independent currency (you lose a lot of control if you don't have one), think the border will be where they want it (it won't be), etc, etc, etc...
I recognise the right of the Scots to an independent country and that the referendum might actually create one. This isn't meant to dispute that. What I am saying is that the SNP don't come across as knowing what they're doing.
Assuming you are a worldwide expert, that has me shaking in my boots. Personally I would say you are a deluded fool who is talking out of his posterior about something which he has no clue about.
It's just so crazy to see a party that used to be such a dominant election winning machine becoming soooo desperate!
"UKIP, lead by wealthy, former Dulwich College educated, 'City Boy' Nigel Farage? The son of a stockbroker too. That's another very privileged life."
Of course, but the Ukip ethos suggests they may brush that off. And they're not the attackers or attacked, so they may gain.
The SNP are doing OK on the line that goes ... "Don't rust the others, they're politicians and therefore lying."
No wonder the Tories want to get rid of him or whichever multiple personality he chooses to be at the time.
The public are also fickle about "personal attacks". They say they don't like them but historical precedent indicates they take the message on board especially if the message passes the sniff test.
The group least likely to vote UKIP are Guardian readers
http://goo.gl/GlGTVQ
Book covers are also interesting to look at. Hoods, bare daggers, silhouetted/dark figures are all pretty common in fantasy.
'70% of North Sea Oil workers in favour of Independence'
http://tinyurl.com/o8gfb9p
@Pinkrose
You are very insistent that the rich should pay a lot more tax and I would like a cogent reason as to why.
I have been working with a scientist to build up an international business, during which he has had to make immense personal and financial sacrifices that have affected markedly his family. He has ploughed back all profits to grow the business and employ people and he has paid himself the minimum and not had a holiday for ten years and works about 12 hours per day, seven days a week. . So now as the business is becoming successful, why should he pay more tax and especially more tax on employing people which tax Labour loves so much?
He may as well move the business out of the UK to a less highly taxed regime - so why should he keep it here?
In the same manner why should James Dyson keep his business in the UK, as he sacrificed a lot in the early days of developing his inventions?
Overtaxing the wealth creators will drive them away overseas and so offer fewer employment opportunities in the UK.
Why do the Tories need to attack Ed Milliband now and do it so directly? Normally this sort of thing is done at arms length.
Ed must be making headway in private polls.
I assume that line is there as it is ideologically opposed to the Millionaire, therefore the implication is duplicitous and untrustworthy.
The remainder is a shot at undermining his only (so far) selling point, as a champion of ordinary people.
I understand why they have done it, and why now. These concepts take time to filter into public acceptance, if they want to diminish the 'Ed, Champion of the consumer and ordinary bloke' image, then best start early.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/23/scottish-referendum-salmond-independence-oil
I'd suggest binning the 'son of a Maxist' and the 'millionaire' bits (with or without a capital M), but the message that Ed is out of touch is a good one. The message should be that he's out with the fairies, not that he's privileged (a battleground which, as our Labour friends have already pointed out with glee, is one the Tories won't win). Ed's Achilles' heel is his love of wonkish and impractical abstractions, his tendency to view everything as an exercise in political theory completely unrelated to reality. The Tories should find a pithy way of going for that.
That said they do have a line of attack on 'real world' given that Farage has actually had a proper job outside of politics unlike the other leaders.
Basically, Cameron beats Miliband, Labour beats Conservative. The Conservatives are trying to get and keep Miliband (and his alleged flaws) in the public consciousness.
Or perhaps it shows a flawed targetting policy? CON resources should be going into the defence of vulnerable seats.
Mr. Smithson, Balls has a 1,000 vote majority. I expect this to balloon next time because there's a sizeable BNP vote to deflate, and the Lib Dems have quite a few to shed as well.
However, perhaps it suggests the Conservatives will try and take X number of Labour seats instead of operating a purely defensive campaign.
Labour lead on being in touch; the Conservatives lead on being competent. The next election will turn on whether people prefer likeability or competence.
'Utterly desperate move by Michael Green. Who does the thinking these days at Central Office?'
Chuka Harrison?
Ed's main weapon is to make a romantic argument for a better world where everyone has a pet unicorn; the Tories' weapon is to say "we'd love to give you a unicorn too, but grown ups know that there's not enough money".
They can't win it but neutralizing it with "they're all the same" is a relative win.
'So, what sort of personal attacks should the Tories be making against Ed? '
That he's just an ordinary guy that lives in a £2.3 million house with a £400,000 mortgage that's never had a job in the real world.
'Revealed: Ed Miliband's Bollinger bolsheviks » The Spectator
www.spectator.co.uk/spectator-life/spectator-life.../socialist-climbing/
21 Sep 2013 - Under the new politics that Ed Miliband heralded when he won the Labour ... attorney general Emily Thornberry has a growing property empire.
I've also heard a new Farscape film is being considered. That'd be bloody weird. It was odd enough seeing Browder and Black together in Stargate.
Hmm. It's also false, now I think about it.
If Scotland has to apply to join euroland then they'll have to have the euro as their currency. So, perhaps the use of sterling would just be for a short period prior to which Scotland will hand its monetary policy from London to Brussels.
Funny sort of independence.
Salmond and Sturgeon are (knowingly) peddling fibs. They do not trust Scots to vote Yes if they are told the truth.
http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKEAT/2009/0219_09_0311.html
"(i) The belief must be genuinely held.
(ii) It must be a belief and not, as in McClintock, an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available.
(iii) It must be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour.
(iv) It must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance.
(v) It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, be not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others (paragraph 36 of Campbell and paragraph 23 of Williamson)."
Rather amusingly, Marxism itself has become an opiate of the people.
No one seemed to pick up on it (probably because it was too batty an idea to be taken seriously in the first place), but the Greens' proposal to purge anyone who believed that anthropogenic global warming wasn't happening from the upper ranks of government might well have fallen foul of this protection.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26325354
Pretty much as everyone expected.
Something along the lines of "Ah, bless, he means well, but would you want him embarrassing you at a G8 meeting?"
http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g293916-d1550648-Reviews-Old_Dutch-Bangkok.html
*CHORTLE*
'(*Nicola Sturgeon all but screamed the Scottish Government’s “Plan B” on currency into Andrew Neil’s ear on the Daily Politics yesterday. Once again, Neil and the rest of the nation’s media either just weren’t listening, or didn’t understand basic Politician. Anyone still telling you we don’t know what “Plan B” is is a slack-jawed halfwit.)'
http://tinyurl.com/o9sf42q
1) an emotional level aimed at the national identity / chip on shoulder / Braveheart target
2) on a we will be better off because those thieving Londoners aren't dipping sticky fingers into our oil well / till
If they tear him to bits, revert to 1). in spades.
He will avoid facts as they are empirical, may well not be on his side, and I don't think he needs them, as he plays the emotional card.
Mr. Jessop, yeah, I was a bit unsurprised by that. The Kinect is really not something I'd want, and Microsoft's dodgy DRM desires were rather off-putting.
Mr. Jessop (again), she must be delighted that Dragon Age Inquisition (out later this year, probably) will feature Morrigan, voiced by Claudia Black. Got to say I'm looking forward to that (it's my only dead cert purchase for videogames this year).
There are so few attack lines Labour have. Bedroom tax. Millionaire's Tax Cuts. Bankers are Satan's Spawn.
The Co-op has done for one of those arguments. Pointing out Miliband is a millionaire makes the "only the posh friend's of Dave benefiting" line look as crass as it always was and gnaws away at another.
Which leaves Labour fighting the election on the repeal of the Bedroom Tax. Maybe. If they can find the money....
Against that - "Don't let Labour feck it all up. Yet again."
Oh, and "Ed Balls wants your First Born sold into slavery...."
http://tinyurl.com/nrkfcte
At least they didn't call him a millionaire son of a dodgy stockbroker.
What happened to Salmond's caste iron sterling currency union or was he just bluffing and knew plan B was the only realistic choice?
Chortle
A Scotland that votes for independence on the basis of what the SNP is selling is going to be a fascinatingly weird parallel universe.