Prescott out of touch with “collaborator” jibe
I know love him or loathe him as the British people do, John Prescott has today gone all hysterical about the fact that former Labour ministers John Hutton and Frank Field have agreed to review pensions and poverty respectively for the Coalition Government.
He has called them “Collaborators”. He seems to have forgotten very quickly that Lib Dems, Shirley Williams and Mathew Taylor amongst others held similar appointments advising Gordon Browns government. Whilst I can tell you that there were eyebrows raised at those appointments there were certainly no screams of “collaborators”.
Of course John Prescott is very much old Labour (or is he hard Labour?) and is still fighting the class wars. He and others in the Labour hierarchy either miss the point completely about this “new politics” of cooperation, concensus building or they are suspicious or fear the end result for their particular brand of confrontational black/white politics.
I think its mostly the latter, with the consequences that may have for Labour generally. Politics in Britain is changing – goodness knows it needed to change – no one knows how it will end up but it’s clear that there will be no going back as promised in the Tory and Lib Dem manifesto’s, so far as I’m concerned whi;lst it may be a bit of a roller coaster ride, it’s certainly change for the better.
Volunteer
Help in election
Report a problem
Join Us
Your views
Register to vote
Postal vote
Email updates
June 21st, 2010 at 4:16 pm
Nice to see that the ‘sane’ wing of the LibDems is not only capable but willing to step up to responsibility. I sincerely hope that 5 years from now the LibDems can look back upon the ‘experiment’ with at least some degree of pleasure and satisfaction. Of course that means taking the Whole Journey, not throwing themselves out of the carriage whenever things get hard. Because if it isn’t hard to do over the next years, it probably isn’t worth all that much anyway.
I personally believe,however, that the touchy-feely wing of the Party will find a new home at some point. Politics for them is never really about the ‘doing’ of things; it’s about how you ‘feel’ about yourself and your ‘goodness’. They will not be able to do the ‘necessary’ without ‘feeling’ too much self-absorbed angst, and will decide that they ‘feel’ better returning to obscurity and irrelevance.
But omelets and eggs and all that good stuff. You can’t be a serious political party unless you can be serious when times allow nothing else.
But when all is said and done, I agree with you that while “it may be a bit of a roller coaster ride, it’s certainly change for the better”.