Ed Miliband finally gets level with the British public:
He told the conference on Tuesday: "I criticise nobody faced with making the toughest of decisions and I honour our troops who fought and died there, but I do believe that we were wrong. Wrong to take Britain to war."
Defence Secretary Liam Fox wants to maintain defence spending, but is in difficulty because he does not know what the British armed forces are supposed to be for:
"I am concerned that we do not have a narrative that we can communicate clearly."
Elsewhere, an old favourite: whither NATO.
Yesterday's gathering of scholars and policymakers, most of them Atlanticists from way back, were mostly at a loss for how to reignite NATO in the wake of Afghanistan. Indeed, it was as pessimistic a gathering as I've seen on the subject.
But this bears watching:
The closest we got was Josef Janning's observation that "relevance is not absolute." But even he conceded that "jobs" was the thing most voters care about these days and that defense spending was likely to have to be sold on that basis.
I'm scoring Not-David's election as a win. David Miliband was completely identified with the war-on-terror agenda and Iraq, and he was rejected. Better yet, clearly and effectively rejected by the Left and by the working class - the peuple de gauche. Dustbin of history, how are you.
Posted by: Alex | September 30, 2010 at 09:51 AM
Also, regardless of union barons etc., a lot of the people (I'm looking at you, Hundal) pulled into finally joining Labour by the end of their government seem far more inclined to support Ed than David. No one joins Labour to reanimate Blairism, I suspect, they go and fellate the Coalition.
[having said which, listening to EdM's speech was an exercise in 'hey, stop nicking things off the 2005-2010 left-of-centre UK blogosphere, we didn't expect anyone was *listening*'. The first stage in detoxification is to eliminate the sources of toxin]
Posted by: Tom | September 30, 2010 at 12:08 PM
I thought it was great, actually: the right guy won, and the wrong guys whining about it and whining about it is making the good feeling last and last.
Posted by: ejh | October 01, 2010 at 08:22 PM
"the right guy won"
(1) Diane Abbott is technically not a guy, and
(2) she didn't win.
[INSERT JOCULAR EMOTICON HERE]
Posted by: mds | October 01, 2010 at 08:56 PM
Didn't David win more MPs and constituencies? Not sure how I'd score that. Great he won, but not so sure about the manner of it.
Diane Abbott pissed what little credibility she still had up a wall as far as I'm concerned.
Posted by: Cian | October 01, 2010 at 10:16 PM