With these two, Dave can win!

Two people will help Dave to win the next General Election, and one of them is not his £500,000 a year Antipodean vote-catcher.

 

Step forward the two ‘Reds’ – Miliband and McGluskey.

 

First-up, Red Ed.

 

Apart from looking absurdly young to be PM, he follows the recent trend of being a career politician who has never done anything else, much like Dave. He is Oxford (PPE – what else?) and LSE-educated. He became an MP at 25, and youngest-ever Leader of the Labour Party at 40. Unsurprisingly, he lacks gravitas.

 

More to the point is where he stands politically.

 

Despite the hysterical rant in the Daily Mail about his father, a Marxist academic, the basic premise is relevant – that a person’s view of life is likely to become fixed at a young age, and it must be a reasonable certainty that Ed’s was heavily influenced by his father’s communist convictions, especially as he is said to have been present during his father’s discussions with like-minded academic friends. His mother was also a left-winger, and an active member of CND.

 

Currently, he is perhaps deliberately vague on major policy issues, but he has ratcheted Labour to the left. Blairism is history.

 

He is an out-and-out Socialist, and proud of it. Will the electorate buy-into that discredited philosophy?

 

Now for Red Len.

 

He has been a trade union official since 1969; he is a child of the destructive brand of unionism that almost brought Britain to its knees in the 1970s, and largely wrecked its own power. He was a supporter of Militant Tendency, and currently supports a rag-bag of left-wingers called Socialist Unity, as if there could possibly be such a thing.

 

Like the Bourbons, he seems to have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing.

 

His concept of unionism is not primarily as a mechanism for the protection of the members but as a political force de frappe that will dictate  public policy.

 

As in the70s, his tactic is ‘entryism’, packing local Labour Parties with class-warriors, and deselecting sitting members opposed to their brutal kind of politics. He is on record as saying that he wants to spend more money on political campaigning and selecting Labour candidates.

 

He has been pretty successful so far in around 40 constituencies, but it rather looks as if the corrupt assault on Falkirk was an entry too far. And he got a bloody nose at Grangemouth.

 

His industrial tactics give rise to a feeling of deja-vu. During the Grangemouth dispute, a senior manager was mobbed at his home; intimidation was used in the BA dispute. Nothing new there, then.

 

Democracy, of course, doesn’t apply in Len’s scheme of things. No less than 63% of his members don’t vote Labour. He himself was voted-in to his £122,000 a year job by 7.3% of the total union membership.

 

With enemies like these, who needs friends?