Englishness Blah

While tending to the school of thought that any politician’s speech that takes “Englishness” or, worse, “Britishness” as its subject will not be worth reading, some of the commentaries on Ed Miliband’s speech are worth while.

Norman Geras, as ever, brings a bit of intellectual rigour to the woolliness, and Anthony Painter brings a political edge. Painter makes one particularly good point:

This all feels like the immigration issue again – Labour never being able to catch up with the argument. Labour will still be celebrating Englishness when the Tories will be contemplating political action.

This is one of the things that is fundamentally wrong with Ed Miliband’s leadership. An inability – indeed, an unwillingness – to try to leapfrog the Conservatives; to take the voters by surprise; to put Labour on the side of the people against the Government.

That means talking about immigration and welfare reform, for example, rather than the NHS and Englishness. We are told that Ed Miliband is going to make a speech about immigration soon. I can’t wait.

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• creggancowboy

  Miliband is Blair Lite, who brought in 2 million Poles and Romanians overnight with no provision for education, health, housing? ZaNuLabour treats the white working class English with contempt, from parachuting Luciana Berger into a jolly Liverpool seat to having Kerry “Feminazi” McCarthy object to anonymity for rape trial defendants (contrary to ECHR law). Where is Jody McIntyre? The only voice here who ever spoke the truth? Oh yes banned. Ah well, I may be off to Greece to cover the elections, how is the “journalism” going John? 

• crotty32

  all the polictical parties despise english people,this can be shown by their actions against the english,labour will crash and burn because it refuses to accept that the english people are human beings