Sunday 23 May 2010

Labour Leadership Attracts Strange Bedfellows

Diane Abbott wants to be Labour Leader - I guess she considers that she has all the required attributes:
  • Hypocrisy: She's sent her son went to a *private school with mainly white teachers and pupils, while she tried to stop anyone else aka white middle-class parents doing the same.
  • Media Friendly - she appears on a late night politics show with an ex-Tory MP and ex- Sunday Times editor, mostly having a pop at the then Labour Government.
  • Left Whinger - A member of the Socialist Campaign Group. She espouses all the 'right on' policies of the left (but see Hypocrite).
  • Absolute Party Loyalty - she has made personal attacks on a number of Labour Ministers and has seemingly not signed up to the idea of collective party/government responsibility.
  • Strong Union Base - she was an Cambridge graduate, who has never worked with any mainstream unions .... a 'high flyer' in the Civil service, Race Relations Officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties from 1978 to 1980 (Amongst her colleagues at NCCL were Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewitt and Paul Boateng, all later becoming Labour Cabinet Ministers...... which tells you a lot about that organisation) and MP and the 'media' (ah hem).
  • Economic Competence - Like all of the 'Left' she advocates spending everyone's money, even after its all gone (ala Gordon Brown), and of course
  • No chance of ever winning a national election unless it was held solely in Peckham, Cheetham Hill, Moss Side and of course Hackney North and Stoke Newington ......
*Her decision to send her son to the private £10,000 a year City of London School, which she herself described as "indefensible" and "intellectually incoherent", caused controversy and was seen by many as hypocritical not least because she had previously criticised Tony Blair and Harriet Harman for sending their children to selective state schools.

It later emerged that Abbott had in fact applied to a total of three separate private schools for her son, and thus apparently had no intention of ever sending him to a state school. Fellow Hackney Labour MP Brian Sedgemore condemned Abbott for the "hurt and harm she had caused to local people in Hackney" who didn't have the means to make a similar choice, suggesting that Abbott would "never be taken seriously again".

Well we shall see .......

The other candidates are ......

  • Andy Burnham
  • David Miliband
  • Ed Miliband
  • Ed Balls
  • John McDonnell

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