Originally Posted by Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog
Now to the matter of the alleged 'Red Ed', the youthful Miliband whose election as Labour leader has prompted almost the entire political media. It contains two delusions. The first is that the trade unions are some sort of repository of revolutionary thought, longing to drag the Labour Party back to the days of Militant, Michael Foot etc.
Piffle. The unions have for years been a powerful and effective pressure group, operating mainly through the EU and its regulatory powers, who have under Labour and Tory governments alike suceeded in securing the imposition on this country of extensive and powerful laws on British workplaces, which the militant shop stewards of 30 years ago couldn't have dreamed of.
The idea that the battles of the 1980s - over nationalisation, union power and so forth, are still in progress is likewise nonsense. The left learned form the collapse of the USSR. It didn't learn that it was wrong. It learned that its methods needed revision. Specifically, it learned that direct state ownership of the economy doesn't work. Instead, they turned to regulation, which allows the state an enormous role in the economy, without the direct detailed responsibility required by nationalisation. Most reasonable people, having experienced privatised utilities - gas, electricity, telecommunications etc, can see that the problems of these industries under state control (especially for consumers) were much more to do with monopoly (which more or less persists) than with ownership. And also that there are some industries, notably railways, which only a wholly dogmatic person would privatise. They are plainly better run by the state.
The division between left and right is now really in the areas loosely described as 'sex, drugs and rock and roll', plus of course the use of the education system to impose equality of outcome on its victims. And on the abolition of national sovereignty and its replacement by global or supranational governance, backed up where necessary with liberal military intervention.
In this division, the Tory, Liberal Democrat and Labour Parties are all on the left, signed up to the sexual revolution, the moral revolution, the cultural revolution, comprehensive education, EU membership, etc.
In which case the real problem is not 'Red Ed', but 'Red Dave' Cameron, 'Red Nick' Clegg and indeed 'Red Dave' Miliband, whose political differences with his brother are too tiny to be perceived without a powerful electron microscope.
And that leaves aside the very strange but true development - that the main qualification for high office these days is not experience, but the lack of it.
You do wonder, looking at these people, whether they have left their lunchboxes at home. Ed himself, with his wide, wide eyes and look of perpetual surprise, seems particularly in need of a mother's love and care.