What is Ed Miliband’s elevator pitch?
Posted on Friday 13 January, 2012
Filed Under Labour Party
THERE is no alternative. It’s the economy, stupid. Third Way. Big Society. Encapsulate your outlook into a pithy slogan of as few words as possible, or risk having someone encapsulate it for you.
That these designations are typically vacuous and point to little of substance matters not. Fail to play the game, and posterity will forever associate you with traffic cones hotlines.
Yet Ed Miliband – raised in a household where the finer points of political sociology will presumably have been routine conversation over the cornflakes – has yet to offer us a boiled-down manifesto.
The result is that even those of us who are well disposed towards the Labour leader remain at a loss to define his message.
Yes, I am glad to see someone in the top job who does not treat trade unions in the same way as US Marines treat the corpses of captured Taliban combatants, and who is even ready to appear on a TUC platform.
But for Miliband simply to define himself as standing for ‘fairness’ in the abstract is not enough. It is not as if any politician of any stripe stands up and openly features iniquity, malfeasance, discrimination, injustice and horsewhipping small children as central to their programme.
And worthy as it is to demand that grannies should be on the lowest available dual fuel tariff, as visions of the future good society go, this is hardly up there with ‘I have a dream’ in the inspirational rhetoric stakes.
The result is that Miliband leaves himself open to sniper fire from both directions. The Tories would slag him off whatever he did, of course. But his continuing lack of clarity gives Blairites and Blue Labour the opportunity constantly to repeat charges of strategic drift and lack of narrative, and the cumulative effect is damaging.
A credible elevator pitch would at once disarm the critics and give Labour Party members something to sell on the doorstep. How hard can it be, Ed?
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Listening to him last night I was reminded what a bloody awful speaker he is.
If he or his people would just start with some policy ideas, the rest can follow. Just needs to say we are different from the Tories because we would do x or y. What’s so hard? Can he really not think of anything he can propose but they cannot?
awful. truly awful a class ‘A’fuckwit. Assissination? It sometimes has actually worked in moving history forward. Maybe it should be given a chance.*
*to the plod: statement above is one of ironic detachment. not *really* calling for ed milli to be offed. Would rather he was shut into a knicker drawer and never let out.
PS. Is there nobody at all e.g. a campbellesque figure who can get a grip of this shit and monster the direction and shit? Doomed.
Just give up on this guy, for crying out loud!
fuckwitt. uter fuckwitted cuernt. how dare you leave a deposit here. fuck off
They certainly need some positive content, in addition to some of the negative regulatory measures already. A shining idea of how we might live better, more fulfillingly.
My solution would be on the one hand to try to make capitalism work as well as it possibly can and, on the other, to use some of the money so generated in tax to fund experimental projects (probably small-scale at first) in the extension of democratic political and economic projects. Perhaps this could work along the lines of the arts council, in which proposed projects are assessed and even some of the odder suggestions given room to fail—but drawing on historical and contemporary examples as either inspiration or warning. And/or offering incentives and space to develop alternative styles of production (as with the medical tricorder in the papers recently) as the potential building blocks of a more productive and less stultifying socio-economic form—a sort of “build your own lifeboats” as the titanic wreck of capitalism sinks behind us. In short, they need to develop schemes to start to socialise entrepreneurship, to give people the skills, infrastructure and confidence to make their own jobs and futures.
This would addressed one of the main problems of the Bolshevik revolution: i.e. the difficulty of conducting experimentation with new institutional forms in the midst of international and civil wars. A sort of revolutionary democratic fiscal conservatism, perhaps.
bollox. what we need is a more thoroghgoing bolshevik revolution – a one where this time no fuckking prisoners are taken
I’m for giving any of them as want to a chance to help, of using “white specialists”—not least because many of them will be able to see, as the process takes shape, that the future will be better for their children, too, and that, chasing money, they lived their lives uselessly and in vain. But it may be impossible to avoid shooting some of them, unfortunately.
Came across this recently as well – like it a lot
——
“wer gon hev some o wors now”
“I was at yor hoose last neet, and meyd mysel very comfortable. Ye hey nee family, and yor just won man on the colliery, I see ye hev a greet lot of rooms, and big cellars, and plenty wine and beer in them, which I got ma share on. Noo I naw some at wor colliery that has three or fower lads and lasses, and they live in won room not half as gude as yor cellar. I don’t pretend to naw yaw very much, but I naw there shouldn’t be that much difference. The only place we can gan to o the week ends is the yel hoose and hev a pint. I dinna pretend to be a profit, but I naw this, and lots o ma marrows na’s te, that wer not tret as we owt to be, and a great filosopher says, to get noledge is to naw wer ignerent. But weve just begun to find that oot, and ye maisters and owners may luk oot, for yor not gan get se much o yor own way, wer gon hev some o wors now…”
-a note left in the house of a pit-owner, after it was broken into during a strike riot, 1831 Source: R. Fyne, The Miners of Northumberland and Durham (1923 ed.) p21 quoted in EP Thompson ‘The Making of The English Working Class’, Pelican, p785
Keegan: “i would love it” etc etc etc
Dave2 says,
“My solution would be on the one hand to try to make capitalism work as well as it possibly can”
Did this cretinism come from someone who asks others to read the Marxists classics!
On Dave2′s ‘experimentation’ ‘idea’, or different styles (novel use of the term) of production, this happens all the time under capitalism anyway! Co-ops, partnerships, single traders, nationalised industries etc etc etc etc.
His last paragraoh is one of the most barmy things I have ever read about Bolshevism.
All very sensible though!
I imagine that neither the Bolshevik revolution nor the Marxist classics are on your list of possible Mastermind topics, Deft M. I would be willing to hazard a guess that dialectics isn’t on there either.
O, and I should have said that such a solution would have the chance of uniting new and old Labours, who at the moment seem lost in a self-indulgent and mutually cancelling struggle to the death, rather than combining top oppose the class enemy.
dk vi fro oon – utteeer euuwrt,
Possibly we should replace Ed Miliband with this blog’s comments box.
Miliband: a man with nothing to say and no way of saying it.
ejh shud be kilderated as well. just for the laff
“The result is that even those of us who are well disposed towards the Labour leader remain at a loss to define his message”
Oh, I think I received his message loud and clear when he knifed his brother between the ribs. It went something like this: ‘ME! ME! ME!’
As for Labour’s economic message, alas, that is less than clear but may not be entirely ‘Cain’ Miliband’s fault.
Balls (on Osborne’s policy to the Fabian magazine a few weeks back but published yesterday: “Nobody in the Labour Party should get into the idea that it has to be this way”.
Balls (today) “My starting point is, I am afraid, we are going to have keep all these cuts.”
Er, have a nice day!
Gawwds troof…
Ed Milliband reminds me of Kinnock started out on the soft left once leader moved rapidly to the right a labour government led by Ed will be little different from the present coalition, just look at the neo liberal policies of the socialist governments in Spain,Greece and Portugal.
“I treat the ridiculous
seriously when I treat it with ridicule.”
– Karl Marx
*****************
Insofar as a Left becomes spectatorial and retrospective, it ceases to be a Left.
Marx was impatient with those who could not see capitalism as riven with contradiction, not all of which was compatible with its continued existence. During the 1860s and ’70s, he insisted upon the possibility and (partial) visibility of communism in working-class practice and “in the lap of capitalist production’.
“The vulgus is unable to conceive the forms developed in the lap of capitalist production separate and free from their antithetical capitalist character” (Capital, III, ch. 23).
In the “vulgus” category we may safely include vulgar Marxists, and sundry McDonald’s-bashing “anti-capitalists”. The new society of the future of course becomes a very mysterious thing, if you cannot even recognise its development within society as it is.
PS- the whole quote is here http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch23.htm
thank you for your interest in this matter
@ David Duff
You have a point but you’ve missed the rest of the quote:
“The OBR’s forecasts are pessimistic. I’m worried that George Osborne’s failure with the economy will turn them into a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it doesn’t have to be this way… Nobody in the Labour Party should get into the idea that it has to be this way.”
In the interview in the Fabian magazine he is basically reiterating the points in the Guardian, i.e. that the cuts will be not be reversed.
There has been a clear and unambiguous volte-face and it’s incredibly depressing. Defending an orientation to the Labour Party gets harder and harder
We’ve blogged on it here:
http://representingthemambo.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/youre-right-ed-balls-it-doesnt-have-to-be-this-way/
I’m quite puzzled by the fact that the Labour Party hasn’t chosen to embrace a sort of neo-Keynesian policy, if only as a vote catcher. When it all went to shit in 2008, everyone was forecasting a Keynesian revival, but this ain’t happened.
(Obviously it’s because social democracy is so hegemonised by neo-liberalism, etc. But I still find it quite odd).
Helena Bonham Carter, the great-granddaughter of Herbert Asquith, complained that for all her advantages and beauty, directors would not hire her because she was not “trendily working class”…
I`m sure Poundland could find her something in one of their emporiums. time for the guillotine to be ressurected.
ps. seriously – KILL THEM ALL
PC PloD: I want you to arrest me cos i hate you and all you stand for. I would also like you to arrest me because i want to kill every last one of you. I also want to torture you horribly befiore i kill you all. If you try to arrest me i wil explode myself in your face and hope that the blast also elimnates all of your close fmly members (by some fliuke).
Daily Mail calls for increase in dead poor people
The Daily Mail has today launched a new campaign for more people in the Third World to die in a ditch.
In a courageous stand against Britain’s nauseating fondness for giving all our money to oddly-named scroungers, the paper has called for a 40 per cent increase in deaths from starvation, disease and being blown to bits by 2015.
In a stirring front page editorial the Mail said: “They just spend it all on drugs.”
The Kill a Brown Baby campaign has been supported by dozens of backbench Conservatives who like being quoted in the Daily Mail, as well as millions of ordinary people across Britain who have really, really thought about it.
Tory MP, Sir Denys Finch-Hatton, said: “The problem with not giving money to the Third World is that you never know if it’s actually working.
“Therefore any reduction in the overseas aid budget will need to be properly audited, perhaps by using death certificates.
“I want to see thousands of them piled high on the desks of the department for overseas development. They could then tot them up using one of those fancy electronic machines that banks use to count money.
“And to maximise openness and accountability they could have a website with different African and Asian countries on it and a rolling tally of the number of brown skinned people we have eased bravely into the afterlife.”
Helen Archer, a taxpayer with all the answers from Stevenage, said: “Last month I was forced to remove the Style and Culture pack from my Sky TV subscription.
“And for what? So Nick Clegg’s Spanish wife can give some penicillin to a Hindu?”
But the campaign has been opposed by people who love the overseas so much you wonder why they do not just go and live there in their own filth.
Tom Logan, a poofter, said: “While subsidising the Indian space programme does seem inexplicable, I am generally supportive of foreign babies remaining alive.
“Not only that but if we help them then one day we might be able to sell things to them and hopefully they won’t come here and blow themselves up on the bus.”
Logan then returned to watching your children through a telescope.
What’s an ‘elevator pitch’?
Yep – as Schmitt pointed out the definition of being political is to have enemies.
The right win and have almost always won because they instinctively understand that and act accordingly – we lose and will always lose because we cannot liberate ourselves from liberal illusions about the brotherhood of man and the transformative power of reason.
I don’t know what an ‘elevator pitch’ is either, nor do I care very much.
One thing I do know about elevators, however, is that they always have to have a shaft.
Balls and Milliband’s exudations of the last few days have shown clearly that NuBluKuKu Labour fully intends public service workers, the chronically ill and disabled, the unemployed and the working poor to be the recipients of said shaft; all in order that they can chase the so-called “squeezed middle” (the latest incarnation of middle-class suburban entitlement junkies).
We used to think that the Labour Party was right-wing under Harold Wilson. He was a raving Trot put alongside nearly the whole of the PLP today.
Give us an alternative, ffs!
What’s an ‘elevator pitch’?
Something Americans use to seal gaps in lifts?
You daft lefties have to wake up. You are in the wilderness and will never be elected. The British have no time for little petty would be dictators. Get behind Labour without the knives.
fuck off.
Exactly Jeelie piece that is what the voters say. Guten Morgen Fuhrer.
Jimmy’s secret army
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nxo0fS2VMM
M. Jelly,
Marvellous clip – this was IIRC directly inspired by General Sir Walter Walker who in 1974 gave multiple interviews ranting about the ‘Communist Trojan Horse in our midst’, Harold Wilson being in the pay of Moscow and the need for the military to step in and save the country from anarchy – in support of which he made some rather farcical attempts to create a para-military organisation called Civil Assistance which according to a Morning Star mole counted ‘one general, nine colonels and six brigadiers and seven other former officers’ at one of their meetings.
souwnds about right Roger. they are all fuckking cuernts. kill them all. I see that that fuckker who plays sherlock fuckking holmes has also been talking bollox in the last few days. i would kill him as well and he would not be able to fake his shit-sodden life this time.
that shud be *DEATH* of course. Fukking education in a place of learning must hev addled my brains (elitist that i am).
I didn’t get where I am today by discussing the technical intricacies of DVD players.
I didn’t get where I am today by *BY TEARING MONEY INTO SMALL PIECES*
with due deference to modernity blerggHH for the bold face tip
here – this may save everyone’s time
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~culttv/cj.htm
roger – from wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Walker_%28British_Army_officer%29#Politics
Politics
Walker then began giving television interviews and then took part in a documentary named A Day in the Life of a General which was never aired due to security reasons, although Walker believed it was banned because he was “revealing the true state of affairs which the politicians are hiding from the public”.[16]
By 1974 Walker had grown “shocked” by the state of the country in general and the “militancy” of the trade unions in particular. In July of that year he wrote a letter to The Daily Telegraph calling for “dynamic, invigorating, uplifting leadership … above party politics” which would “save” the country from “the Communist Trojan horse in our midst”. After the publication of this letter Walker claimed he received positive responses from Admiral of the Fleet Sir Varyl Begg, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor, a few British generals, ex-MPs, the Goon comedian Michael Bentine and the shipping industrialist Lord Cayzer.[17]
Shortly after this letter the London Evening News (now defunct) gave Walker a front-page interview and asked him if he could imagine a situation in which the army could take over Britain. Walker responded: “Perhaps the country might choose rule by the gun in preference to anarchy”,[17] although Walker always argued he hated the idea of a military government in Britain.[1]
By August 1974 Walker had joined the anti-Communist Unison group (later renamed to Civil Assistance) which claimed would supply volunteers in the event of a general strike.[18] Walker claimed it had at least 100,000 members, which led Defence Secretary Roy Mason to interrupt his holiday by condemning this “near fascist groundswell”.[19] In 1975 Walker travelled to various boardrooms in the City of London in the hope of securing money and support.[20] After Margaret Thatcher was elected Leader of the Conservative Party Walker and Civil Assistance faded from the media although he still travelled abroad, notably to Rhodesia and South Africa.[21]
Walker privately told journalists that he thought Harold Wilson was a “proven Communist” and that there was a “Communist cell” in Downing Street[22] (conclusively disproven by MI5 investigations)[citation needed]. He advocated Enoch Powell as Prime Minister and favoured “tougher” measures against the IRA. He was an early member of the Conservative Monday Club and about 1984, until his death, became Patron of the ultra-conservative, anti-communist, and anti-Marxist pressure-group, the Western Goals Institute.
In 1980 his book The Next Domino?, with a foreword by Monday Club MP Julian Amery, was first published simultaneously in the UK, the US, and South Africa. In the 1980s, Walker’s health began to decline and he underwent two hip operations in military hospitals. They left him permanently disabled which led to Walker suing the Ministry of Defence in 1990. The suit was eventually settled out of court.[23]
a customisable fuckking tool aka Moany Sunddial
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2012/01/16/what-sort-of-tech-tools-do-online-activists-need/
he has forgot about crunk vegetarian fund raisers.
From WikIpedia:
Sunny Hundal (born 1977) is a British blogger and self-publicising fence-walking careerist liberal who would sell his left knacker for five minutes on Newsnight, or failing that the One Show.
He was born in London to Sikh parents of Indian origin. He describes himself as a vegetarian and a strong environmentalist.[1] He failed a degree in Economics from Brunel University and has written ill-informed, opinion-mongering, ignorant and vapid online ‘have your say’ type word-salads for leading British newspapers including The Financial Times and The Independent. He has been interviewed by ITV News, Sky News, and Channel 4 News and in each case was not just an embarressment to himself but also, all of the crunk music loving, vegetarian airhead and twatter-commentariat parochial bullshitting tossers who infest the meedjia.
Sunny Hundal was the founder and editor of the now defunct Asians in Media website.[2] He also set up the now defunct Barfi Culture community website.[3] Both of these websites were instrumental in establishing Hundal’s credentials as a commentator on British Asian identity politics. In 2006 he was one of the founder members of the now defunct New Generation Network, a short-lived group and manifesto that attempted to challenge the current discourse on race relations in the UK.
Hundal now runs the Pickled Politics weblog,[4] which describes itself as politically illiterate, and deals with issues related to his own bizarre brand of Yellow-Tory obfuscation and stupidity. He is a regular troll on Comment is Free at The Guardian webshite, and was named as their Dipshit of the year in 2006.[5] In 2007 he started a website, a group blerrgGH which features a number of mainly ignorant tossers and wannabe journo scum or ‘authors’ with rather confused ideas about just what liberalism actually is. His own blog there has been featured in the New Statesman’s “crappest of the blogs” selection.[6] Other newspapers have described him as a moron[7] and a well-known twittering eedjiot with too much time on his thick and dumpy hands.[8]
Hundal has criticised various religious organisations including the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir,[9][10] the Muslim Council of Britain,[11] Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK,[11] Christian Concern For Our Nation,[10] Sikh Federation[12] and Hindu Forum of Britain.[12]
In February 2007 he made a BBC radio documentary Lost in Translation about Asian brides brought to the UK.[13] The BBC also quoted his claim that Shahrukh Khan’s endorsement of skin-lightening creams was “completely immoral”.[14]
Despite his supposedly ‘left’ wing credentials he has written praising the slave-state of Dubai[15], where workers are denied basic rights and conditions and jailed for attempting to organise. He opposes strikes and other industrial and direct action and denounces “Trots” and anarchists while calling for “left unity”.
In 2008, he wrote a blog post saying that non-white voters should consider voting Conservative, on the basis that “brown people” were having cameras put in their wheelie bins by the New Labour government of Gordon Brown. He became a fervent supporter of David Davis the well known Tory “Hang ‘em high and flog ‘em” civil wibbertarian. [16]
In 2010, on his Liberal Conspiracy blog, he personally backed the Liberal Democrats in the UK General Election.[17] The Liberal Democrats went on to form a Coalition Government with the Conservative party.
About 3 months after the Coalition Government was announced Hundal joined the Labour Party in order to influence its political direction even further to the right than it currently is.[18] In August 2010 Hundal personally backed Ed Miliband in the Labour leadership election, for which Ed expressed his heartfelt thanks by sending Hundal three dozen yellow roses.[19]
Sunny Hundal is well-known as the basis for Charlie Brooker’s character Nathan Barley.
note to moany sundial age 9 and 3/4
Shut your fucking face
Instead of complaining about how you can no longer afford the gym, a pretend sandwich, a few drinks after work or a Sky subscription, why not try shutting your ghastly fucking hole for five minutes?
“the political consciousness of groups which long imagined themselves to be among the most advanced, displays itself, at a moment of change, as a colossal obstacle in the path of historical development”.
take note cuernTS
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/ch01.htm
and fuck off liberal cuernts especially i.e. moandial scummy
oh dear. have i went on too much?
awfully sorry
fuck.off.
i herdc hundel is orangaising a vegan crunk night to raze awareness about his gapp yah project to enoocorage brwon peeple to suppsot the toriues and everybodie elese to vote for a hung pparliment. he’#s the collest guy youlll ever kown.
Current Affairs Quiz: Hamas are…
*A 1970s Palestinian dance troop.
*A liberation movement for mankind in its entirety .
*Deeply upset by the recent demise of Norman Wisdom.
*A public spirited social charity along the lines of Cameron’s BIg SociEty ethos.
*Merely playing with cheap fireworks that would bounce off you if you wore a thick felt coat, even if they fired in the right direction.
*Our fault, of course.
A stormtrooper in a teacup. Old boy.
A flat-packed shelving unit from IKEA.
Fighting to reduce carbon emissions.
woT iz Moany sUndial’S latest PROjECT?
I haven’t bean keeping upP with all the high-level actiVisM recently. TwiTTEr gang rapes or somEThinG while telliNg peeplle to Vote For WIbbUrwulls but not labore or tOree — but then change mind to Civil libertarian hang and flogg em davis davis youtUbe it all and twitter sum more about stuff that cool kidz are into like wearing dodgy facial hair and hitting peeple with a rolled up newszpayper on lawn of that lonDon.
Hunal; he is the real deal when it comes to meedjia nodal point star of the multimeedialanded gentry.
http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/731/motorbikecelebchildr.jpg
“It’s time for brown people to switch to Tory”
-Sunny Hundal, 16 June 2008
SUnny HundeL: just 1 gear on his fixie bike. knot that I’m encouraging cycL0phobia or any otehrj form of raycism.