PERHAPS THEY SHOULD JUST MERGE AND SAVE ON THE ADMINISTRATION COSTS?

There are rumours that Ed Miliband is on the way out. The bookies have cut the odds on his not leading Labour into the next election. Gossip from Simon Carr of the Indy, suggest he may be gone by Easter.  

 

So who have they got to replace him? Surely his brother wouldn’t consider being second hand Rose? In any case would he be any better? So, would it be Ed Balls, close bosom friend of the retired chef de cuisine of the stew that the country is in, Gordon End to Boom and Bust Brown?

Ed’s wife Mrs Balls, knowing how her husband covets the job, would surely never take it from him. And the rest? Burnham, Murphy, Alexander? They’d all be just as bad.

Labour are lost. Tony Blair made them Tory Light in order to make them electable in the south of England, where half the UK population lives. It was a good move politically. They got 13 years of government out of it, and Blair himself became a multi millionaire on the back of his war crimes. But ideologically they have never really got over this, because they don't now know that they are for.

They used to be about the "working man": the factory worker, the miner, the foundryman, the ship builder, the agricultural worker, but Thatcher got rid of most of them, put them on the dole, or on the "sick", and sold the rest shares and houses.

It wasn’t enough to be for the workers anymore; there weren't enough workers.

So they elected themselves a complete loser. A man who oozes indifference; who seems even when he is telling you how passionate he is about something, lacks any kind of sincerity. A man who, from day one, has been a dead loss weight round their collective neck.

Cameron is not clever. He’s cunning and devious, but he’s not good with facts, lacks depth and gets easily flustered if people push him. The Flashman tendencies are never far from the surface, which makes him incredibly vulnerable. He’s already been forced to apologise for wisecracks, and biting sarcasm delivered in barely controlled temper.

And yet this second rater can't begin to unseat him. Just imagine if there was a prime minister who was clever and knowledgeable!

Look at some of the things the government is doing will completely change the character of English life: eg, introducing a two tier health service where the rich will pay for better treatment IN NATIONAL HEALTH HOSPITALS, and where, because of the shortage of facilities, the poor will wait till their betters are seen to, scanned, exrayed, operated upon, looked after in ICU, de-fibrillated...  for their turn, if all the staff haven't gone home by that time.

And then there are measures that will cause hardship in the whole of the UK. Cameron once said that it made him physically sick to think of a guy who had stolen, say a couple of bottles of water, being allowed to vote. (I imagine because he fondly imagines that most of them would vote Labour; the people who count usually being able to call in the odd favour to avoid such indignity.)  Well, it makes me physically sick to think that I belong to a society that sends patients with life threatening illness to a job readiness interview, or denies severely disabled children benefits when they come to 18, and thereby denies them any independence, because they’ve never paid any National Insurance.

And still this Labour can’t get get the upper hand, because they can’t really argue with most of what Cameron says. Even tonight Balls was saying that it's unlikely that they would reverse any of the Tories cuts.

It doesn’t matter much whether it’s Miliband Maximus or Minimus, Balls male or female, Andy Birnham or anyone else for that matter. Labour hasn't got any soul left. Once their raison d’être was lost, they were lost. In the south of England they compete for the same votes now as the Tories do. Nowhere else matters that much, for that is where the elections are won and lost. 

That's why the Tories too were useless in opposition. They don’t seriously OPPOSE each other any more.

This should have been the Liberal’s opportunity to make a massive comeback, and they blew it, which is, I think, unfortunate for everyone in the UK.

Pics: Ed, David and Andy, all apparently describing things of varying sizes