David's soul

In what's been tagged as an opening move for the top job in Britain, South Shields MP David Miliband wrote this missive in the Guardian, positioning himself and the Labour Party. It could be summarised as "We're Not Tories". It's more of the same oldskool NuLab tosh. I loved this bit:

"Every member of the Labour party carries with them a simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, not the few."

Labour have privatised and off-balance sheeted beyond even the most ardent Thatcherite's free market wet dreams. Much of our public services are being run now for private profit at a higher cost than if it had been run by the public sector. More is being prepped to go into private hands. Those membership cards must be so buried behind wads of cash that the "guiding mission" has been suffocated.

Anyhow, it's already been covered by Curly, but what has really interested me is the local angle.

First is the Gazette's coverage of the story. A massive front page splash reporting the article written for, hold on, it doesn't say where! Even the Gazette editorial could only just manage to strain itself so far to describe the source of the piece as "a national newspaper". If you're going to lift whole blocks of text from another newspaper then you should at least have the courtesy to give it credit. It's really bad show chaps.

Also in the Gazette, Alliance newbie councillor and former chairman of the South Shields Labour Party and former Labour councillor Geraldine White was quoted as saying:

"He doesn't promise anything unless he can deliver."

Whoa! Way to be opposition there Geraldine! But that's not all. On the Gazette website there's a fuller account, getting positively all moist over our own 'I'm David'. She swooned:

"David is a man of honour, and that is a quality which is highly prized in politics. He doesn't promise anything unless he can deliver. I endorsed him when he came to South Shields as MP in 2001, because he was open, honest and frank. On a personal level, he's very funny, he was [sic] a great sense of humour, and he adores his family."

It's kind of her to remind us that she endorsed the guy: friend and confidant of Tony Blair, who was parachuted into a safe Labour seat, and so close to former MP and waste of space David Clark's mysteriously timely ennoblement. Yay cronyism! And now she endorses DM for PM. Awww. It makes yer feel all warm don't it?

With enemies like Geraldine, Labour don't need too many friends. I think that's how it goes. Surely it can't be long before she's welcomed back into the Labour fold?