Mancunian Misery

David Milliband's face during his victorious brother's speech this afternoon simply said : "I feel sick". Sick from every angle. For himself, the party, the country, about the outcome and some of the acts, duplicity even,and behaviours which led to it. Surely the Miliband family dynamics can never be the same again and yet his younger brother was prepared to risk and accept that in order to take the coveted crown? Totally unscrupulous (old politics surely?) or just naive? From the votes of all but the unions in the Labour leadership ballot, David should have been the man on the stage, the man to take Labour on from here and further from its suffocating socialistic past.There was a real opportunity here for the party and the country but essentially old, old Labour looks as if it has blown it. Ed's rhetoric about a new generation taking over, New Labour being dead, looks uncomfortably like a swing not to the future but the emotional comfort zone of the past. It may please a hard core of older party members and traditional union chiefs but it has little to offer the young for whom he claims the new (refurbished/disguised) old is designed and even less to appeal to current Tory voters south of The Wash. Tragic. David's speech yesterday gave a lot of clues as to what his speech today would have said and sounded like and what a refreshing and revitalising power he could have been in British politics. We should all feel sick.

The Brothers and Sisters head on back.

For anyone hoping for wider spinoffs from the coalition era of new harmony, burying of hatchets and an energised forward vision of a new, upbeat, success driven Britain,the annual meeting and snarlfest of the TUC's brothers and sisters in Manchester last week was a predictable disappointment.Rows of unhappy looking people declined the opportunity to embrace the coalition spirit and look for new and more harmonious ways ahead. The tempation to dive back into the cosy heartlands of class warfare and strikes against the horrors of unknown cuts to come was just too great as was the potential fun of causing disruption to goods and services throughout the land."Action" is fun and good for recruitment. Calm waters much less so, especially during the grey dullness of winter.

The delegates did not look like people set to enjoy themselves. Unions do not generally do not exhibit happy and contented people. Unhappy and discontented ones give them their energy,- and membership fees. Many at Manchester will have returned home with a spring in their step and full of enthusiasm for the new rallying calls of "No to Cuts". Not since the heady days of the "No to Poll Tax" have they had such a unifying bogeyman, even if it is as yet undefined. The homeward trains were probably full of people happy to be unhappy who felt they had had a good week.Their fellow passengers may not have been so enthusiastic about the prospect of future journeys being shunted into the sidings with hollow statements of "Of course we regret inconvenience to the public". Still, at least the brothers and sisters are out in the open. There is no doubt where they stand,- and it's not with those whose daily lives they will mess up or whose jobs they will also jeopardise as colateral damage.A consistent result of serious strikes is ultimately less jobs, including in the industries the unions claim to be protecting. That means more hardship and more misery. But then if it creates a downward spiral of misery that's just fine isn't it? Didn't the miners, Fleet Street printers, shipyard and legacy car company workers , just to metion a few, do well?

The Manchester jamboree was just another missed opportunity. Anyone surprised?

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Happy New Year in September? Yes,indeed. The UK's mass return to work on Monday 6th September, was for many the first day of fully manned offices since the summer wind down started with Ascot, Wimbledon and Henley. This week the tanned and refreshed bounded back into their offices full of the ideas,visions,enthusiasms for things new and energetic determination to tackle the old intractables. Long may this state of mind continue against the inevitable ambush of vested interests,finance departments, status and barrier/barricade protectors and naysayers.Our TV sets were filled with the healthy bonzed faces of the top tier of editors and journalists.Even our politicians term started early. Terms are what the New Year is all about. We are all conditioned at an early age to the academic year rather than its calendar cousin which wearily occupies midnight of 31st December/1st January as the last gasp of a binge which started for many as far back as mid December. Forget all the Christmas cracker type good resolutions hastily thought up and pronounced on those two days. The reality of calendar New Year is an adrenaline fuelled fight against near exhaustion through weeks of over eating and over drinking and shock and awe as the reality of the resultant credit card bills, merrily racked up in December heaves into sight.

Accepting then that the first full week of September is the real New Year, what can we expect from all this new energy and excitement? A roller coaster of a year filled with new vision and opportunity arising from a slimming down of state spending and activity or one, as the media would seem to prefer it,full of fear and difficulty? Will "the cuts" be designed around a new structure for doing things better, faster and more efficiently or will be they be a dreary collection of "the pain must be shared" piecemeal moves with no overall purpose other than to reduce the horrendous short term overspending habits of the recent political era? There is a big difference between the two things. The former would lay the basis of a new lower cost, faster moving Britain with burocracy cut away, pointless jobs binned and common sense as the yardstick for a new, slimmer approach to government. The latter would leave the fundamental structural problems of too much government, over regulation and the stifling of initiative in place. The cuts , far from being the menace painted by the rearward facing amongst the unions and others , could be the springboard to new things, new jobs and a much more competitive future for UK Plc.(Health Warning,- The EU doesn't like the idea of one member state being more efficient than its bretheren. Competition amongst members is some kind of taboo).In a few weeks we will know.

Non socialist Britain has long eschewed anything that looked like a national vision or plan as something essentially too centralist and controlling. For that the Harold Wilson/George Brown National Plan of the mid 1960s has much to answer. They were on track in seeing the need for a plan which would fix clear common goals and prevent the actions of one department or group making those required by another totally impossible,- sometimes for ever. The mistake they, being socialists, made was to see the plan as a device for detailed cebntralised control rather than as a broad umbrella freeing up the deployment of initiative, energy and inspiration. It was a dead hand pushing down rather than an open one setting the birds free to fly. Which do we as a country want? Which are we going to get? There is a huge opportunity, -unseen by the unions and quite likely by many in the political parties,- to radically and beneficially restructure the way we do things rather than to simply stop doing them on the one hand or just sail on spending as we are regardless of the unsustainable cost for future generations on the other. Let's hope the opportunity is taken. The alternative looks like a smouldering ruin.

Whatever the outcome,Twigaview and its aviation and transport related cousin Airnthere (http://airnthere.blogspot.com ) will cast a light on some of the realities, possibilities, nonsenses and even lighter moments.
Again, Happy New Year!