Quoted for truth #29 17
Ben Riley-Smith in the Telegraph, 15 August 2013:
Our emphasis. Don’t ever say you weren’t warned, folks.
Ben Riley-Smith in the Telegraph, 15 August 2013:
Our emphasis. Don’t ever say you weren’t warned, folks.
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, 12 August 2013:
It is hard to see the British Labour party as a leftwing party at all.”
David Aaronovitch, The Times, 8 August 2013:
You might find this an interesting read.
(No, we have no idea why his face is so shiny.)
ComRes for ITV News, 20 July 2013:
Former Labour MEP Hugh Kerr in the Herald, 12 Jun 2013:
To be honest, readers, if Scotland votes No in 2014 our main life priority is going to be developing a convincing Welsh or Irish accent. It’d just be far too embarrassing and depressing to constantly have to try to explain it to the rest of the world otherwise.
Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, 2 July 2013:
“The only place to cement social change is in the hearts and minds of voters. Blair and Brown were defeatists, convinced Britain was essentially conservative, individualist, imbued with Thatcherism.
Confronted with the Mail, Sun, Times and Telegraph, the culture looked immutable, a force to be appeased. Not even when ordinary living standards plummeted as banks were bailed out did Labour seize the chance to make a stronger social democratic case.
Ideas matter. Had Labour changed the political climate (as Cameron briefly thought), this government could not dismantle the social state. But like tumbleweed, Labour policies put down no roots to anchor ideas of collective provision and social protection.”
In the full article, Toynbee rather glosses over some of Labour’s failings in power in her eagerness to present a rosy picture of 13 years in which inequality grew almost constantly. But the paragraphs above concisely and surgically extract the heart of the party’s betrayal of not only its own voters, but the whole concept of British democracy – and inadvertently also the reason why it won’t win the 2015 election.
The only mistake Toynbee makes is to imagine that it matters.
Stephen Noon in the Scotsman, 25 June 2013:
There’s an intriguing interview in today’s Sunday Herald with ‘Better Together’ campaign director Blair McDougall (described by the paper as a “Labour apparatchik”), to mark the anniversary of the campaign’s launch. We recommend buying the paper – our digital copy costs just 69p from PressReader – and reading the whole thing, but if you’re pressed for time the last few paragraphs sum up the content pretty accurately.
And if you’re really in a rush, the last two sentences will do.
One last snippet from “Road To Referendum” episode 3:
That’s Henry McLeish, former Labour First Minister and still (as far as we know) a firm advocate of a No vote. The comments seemed especially pertinent this week when the two competing parties in today’s Aberdeen Donside by-election both tweeted pictures from the local Aberdeen newspaper the Evening Express, quoting vox-pops with some of their respective voters.
Scotland on Sunday, 17 June 2013:
It’s nice to know those horrible hours of painstaking effort pay off sometimes.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)