The Peoples' Ed.

Ed Miliband,the man who only 8 months ago was a close advisor to his spend, spend, spend, spent,predecessor when announcing a two year review of Labour Party policy yesterday declared that it should be "The Peoples' Party".

Could this be a little unwise? Things with "Peoples'" in their title, whether Peoples' Princesses or Peoples' Democratic Republics tend not to have very happy records. In the case of the latter they also usually mean the reverse of what they say.Labour has a particular problem with the title as it really doesn't mean all of the People anyway. Just some of them. It heartily dislikes vast swathes of the electorate especially the non Labour better off including anyone in the 50% tax bracket,- ie the aspirants once they have made it,- Tories in any shape or form but with Etonians first up for the guillotine,expatriates,those who enjoy country sports and large numbers of others who escape urban state dependency. These they see as not People.The New Labour project was all about leading the party away from all these hangups from the past, but Ed with his references to the need to put New Labour behind and about socialism not being a dirty word, appears through the fog to be be encouraging a slide back to the comfort zones of the past.He must know the maths of where that leads but the heart is leading the head.

Is Ed a People anyway? With an actively political family background,a father who like Browns' looms large amongst his influencers and post university career only in politics it's a fair question.Fratricide is rather unusual too.

For Prince Philip in Abu Dhabi-An Answer.

Prince Philip, visiting Abu Dhabi with the Queen yesterday, is reported to have crustily asked a British expatriate "What are you escaping from?" He then went on to be reluctant to shake the hands of others.

The person concerned was either too taken aback or too polite to give a quick and pithy answer, so just to help His Royal Highness could we suggest that the instant list could have included:"High taxes,the inability to save, buy a house and educate my children, and have a substantially better life". Add to that "UK parochialism,politics,militant trade unions, beaurocracy,obsession with health and safety, political correctness,big brother directives of all sorts, restrictions on working hours and ability to make money and oh yes, its class divisons and social snobbery." That's just an off the top of the head start.

One might also uncharitably observe that didn't the Prince leave the land of his birth rather more permanently than most expats and didn't he do well?

BA/Iberia. The Galleon Sails On.

See sister Blog, Airnthere ,at: www.airnthere.blogspot.com for latest thoughts about the proposed merger between BA and Iberia.

Do shareholders and staff really know all they should from the shareholders' magazine Overview which claims to contain "Everything you need to know about the proposed merger" scheduled for January 2011 ,- and is this a good time for it?

Royal Easter Bunnies. Who gets the eggs?

Many column miles are being and will continue to be devoted to the Royal Wedding, now confirmed to be on 29th April 2011. Amidst those cheering and enthusiastic about the prospect of a double Bank Holiday weekend stretching over eleven days are a good number snarling from their sofas about the cost, the Royals and all sorts of social hangups. Others point to the British disease of more and longer complete "works shutdowns" (Parliament probably being the biggest offender). We pretty much write off the second half of December, Easter has already been lengthening into a week, the summer break or at least the period in which anywhere near 100% manning of offices is likely, runs from mid June to early September. Then there's the winter half term.. and so it goes on. Allied to this, industrialists bemoan the loss of more production days. "Where will it end ?" they ask as the gap between European and Asian productivity expands by the day.


Back to this particular hopefully one off occasion, my guess is that at worst the whole event will be cost neutral with some businesses doing very well out of it at least balancing those who lose. The travel and hospitality industry and their suppliers will be particularly jubilant and brewers and wine merchants over the moon. The VAT collectors should be pretty happy too. In mid summer most London hotels and airlines are full anyway, so the incremental gains would have been low. April 29th, just after a very late Easter, should be the beginning of a low demand period stretching into June, so this will allow maximum gain and produce a significant mini boom right at the beginning of the 2011/2012 financial year for the many companies who run from April to March.


Whether the other big beneficiaries will be British and therefore good for the domestic economy or foreign manufacturers of memorablia/souvenir mugs and the like remains to be seen .If UK producers can't even compete in the tat market we really are in trouble.Whatever happens though we will see a large amount of foreign exchange flow in with every Eurostar and flight from America. Thankyou everybody,- we really need it and thankyou to the happy couple for choosing a date which really does give UK Plc the highest potential for gains and the ringing of tills.That should cheer us up a bit. That other couple, Dave and Nick, will be looking forward to it too.

Rememberance Day and Symbols in Afghanistan

TV pictures of Sunday's Rememberance service at Afghanistan's Camp Bastion pose a question.

The need to honour Rememberance Day is clear, but the appearance of crucifixes on these occasions in Afghanistan itself, is a bonus to the Taliban. You can bet that copies will be being passed around amongst them, especially the young and impressionable ,as undeniable evidence of a jihad on the part of the western alliance. Time to delink religious from military affairs? The same though occured recently when standing on the site of the Isandalwana massacre of the British by the Zulus and reading the sad epitaphs "For God and Country". What had God got to do with it? We had turned on our erstwhile allies. There were no religious factors involved.How could we justify what we were doing by claiming it was some kind of crusade? It wasn't and nor is Afghanistan. A war against extremists, yes, but against Islam as a whole no. That has to be completely clear to avoid any possibility, intentional or unintentional, of being accused that it is part of our agenda.

Gordo Condescends to Westminster.

Is this the right verb? A cross between movement down the surface of the earth from North Queensferry to the Palace of Westminster and a downwards move by a great one to more the company of more earthly,- even if upper atmosphere,-ones ? Anyway, it happened last week when our former Great Leader visited a Select Committee to lecture them on aid to the developing world, his current big interest. He had been to Africa recently on an in-depth daytrip to a conference in Kampala and seemingly had time to visit a school where he noticed that the one computer wasn't even linked to the internet. He also took the opportunity to mention that it was common for ex Prime Ministers not to visit MP's alleged principle place of play,- the Commons,- much. Maybe too Commons ? Clearly he has not scanned the benches opposite and caught sight of Messrs Hague and Duncan-Smith who have been happy to swallow their pride and contribute extensively and usefully to the proceedings.
Conscious still of his possible interest to less good elements of mankind, he or his security people have had Google Earth delete his North Queensferry home from their maps. This apparently in the interests of his wellbeing. Could anyone really be bothered to go up there and seek him out,- the easy to spot one in the 24/7 suit? Probably not,but never mind. How many Google scanning hits does North Queensferry get anyway?

Headline News,-Australians Unhappy.

Australian readers, while delighted to hear that Oz had hit the number one BBC and ITV News spots with the Qantas A380 story last week, have been dismayed that it took a negative story to achieve that.

Sorry folks but it's an introduction to the Media, and not only the British ones. They don't do good news. Anything without the words "Shock, Horror, Chaos, Debacle, Scandal" doesn't grab the audience's attention. The British are though probably at the extreme edge of misery spectrum. We really don't do good news. This is the country where "Mustn't grumble" means "I'm feeling really great/am deliriously happy/am superby fit or "Everything's going really well". To get number one news slot here two things must happen simultaneously.First UK Plc is,- most unusually,- not in the poo, or at least not enough in the poo.Second,- you are,- and in a big way.Normally the top British news item, however trivial, will see the rest of the world shuffled down the pack. The Chilean mineworkers rescue broke through not because it was going superbly well but because the media pack was camped around the top of the tiny shaft waiting for that bullet thing to get stuck. Happily they were disappointed so had to run with the very good news story.Don't get carried away though folks. It was a one-off and business is now back to usual. Unless you down under can come up with a big hit like "Uranium Deposits make all Australians Radio Active", it is likely to be a while before you hit the jackpot again.

The Qantas A380 Incident -Australia Hits UK News Number One Slot for first time in living memory?

Congratulations Antipodeans! You've made it after decades of struggling to get a toehold, however small, on the top end of British TV News. You've scored, though only modestly, at least twice in the last couple of years with the bush fires and the recent "Woman Knifes Man" stuff about your previous Prime Minister getting it in the back behind, or even before, the curtains.Ozzie politics were always considered to be "more robust" than ours, but then we quickly trumped this one with our very own "Brother Knifes Brother" story in the Labour Party leadership elections.


Last night, for the first time in living memory ,with the Qantas A380 Singapore story, an Australia related item hit the number one spot on both BBC 1's and ITV1's main evening news bulletins.Grainy pictures of the aircraft flying over Indonesia's neighbouring Batam Island were followed by better ones of the apparently damaged wing leading edge, a pretty decent landing at Singapore, engineers on the ground examining the damaged engine and pretty together and cheerful looking passsngers streaming through the airport arrivals en route to an unexpected fully paid for evening in town. Free counselling or a late meal and a cold Tiger down at the quays? What a choice. Any veteran national servicemen or sailors amongst them looking forward to revisiting their youthful haunts in old Bugis Street were in for a sore disappointment though.


The script made a much bigger meal out of it than the pictures, but that's our media. Australia had successfully beaten the next two world items,"Paedo Nursery School assistant jailed" followed by Obama's bad news day. Thanks to you down under we here were spared another evening of seamingly endless headlines about our wicked coalition government's evil cuts and the forthcoming end of the world as we've known it.

So... well done folks, but don't expect another number one headline slot for a while.

UK Prisons:Lean cuts. Not just porridge.

Amidst all the current flurry of Government spending announcements accompanied by frenzied and often near hysterical speculation about their effects ,the junior minister responsible for prison food,- not a cabinet position but who knows what the future holds?-recently decreed that Her Majesty's honoured guests should be offered a choice of at least five main dishes on their lunch menu.
If as the alarmists predict, we are faced with mass redundancies, loss of housing,deteriorating health care, no school places for our children and a general degradation of living conditions, life in prison must move higher up the list of career options. The only problem is that ,as there is to be a squeeze on the number of places inside, it will be a case of first come first serving and served.

As a spinoff can we expect that in view of inevitable increased food wastage behind the walls,the leftovers will be sent to the struggling old folks home down the road?

Dave, the Banana Skin and the Isolated Leader Syndrome.

For politicians (and others) even at the height of success, the seeds of eventual credibility loss and ultimately failure can be sown in what can appear to be quite minor things. They can deal confidently and competantly with the heavy affairs of state and then comes along a momentary aberration in a situation which must have appeared free of danger and easy to handle. Suddenly the carefully nurtured credibility is blown and there is a head-in hands moment. Gordon Brown experienced it when he stepped back into his car still wearing a live microphone. It was a seminal moment in the May General Election.

The moment isn't ripe for a disaster yet but the amber lights should be flashing for David Cameron all over Downing Street and the Tory HQ at the news that his personal image-making photographer has suddenly been put on the civil service payroll to continue his trade at public expense.Suddenly exposed to view is an unhealthily narcissistic approach by a leader who has said he is committed to cleaning up politics and the public's perception of them via a policy of transparency and honesty.

It is early days for a leader to be losing an understanding about how people in general (Let's avoid the awful patronising term "the public") view such things. It was a very easy banana skin to see, so why did he tread on it so blindly and insensitively? It is the sort of incident which they may brush off and try to quickly forget about(which Brown's wasn't. He must still cringe at the thought of it), but it can easily form the first marker in what could be the beginning of a series which, like blips on a radar screen, eventually join up to form into a calamtous disaste. With each one,relatively small though it may be, mutters grow into murmurs which grow into open hostility and eventually and "Enough- Off with his /her head!" Margaret Thatcher's "We are a grandmother" was a classic. She survived all the ups and downs of the Falklands, the miners strike etc , but this inappropriately regal comment really started the slide into "She must go". Blair built up the same sort of bow wave of resistance and eventually ridicule -anyone's worst enemy- which became "He must go", even though the alternative was not attractive.

There is a banana skin syndrome here,- and David Miliband didn't do well with bananas either. Cameron would get a much better return from a non public funded watcher for yellow fruit on the pavement than having a new civil service photographer on hand to record the damage post facto.

These incidents apart, there must be a question about how the detatchment from normal life affects the leaders' comprehension and thinking . It happens happens once anyone gets the key of Number 10 or any other large residence which brings with it the battalions of security, advisers,and the rest which quickly cut the incumbent off from normal life.It happpens lower down the ranks on the top floors of corporate exceutive suites and in lesser forms all the way down the tree of authority or seniority. At the top end, what happens to someone who can no longer stroll unaccompanied down the road, buy a newspaper, sit in a cafe or ride on a bus or train and in so doing just hear what people are thinking ,saying and doing, what is driving their lives, what they want and what they don't want? Add to this often grovelling deference and the insulation that increasingly starves the victim of basic human understanding. For a new national leader, after only six months of this detatchment not to have thought: "This appointment isn't very sensible" is worrying. Dave needs to find a way to tunnel his way back,- and find some good, down to earth in-touch advisors or the accusation "He just doesn't get it" thrown from the perky new lad on the benches opposite will start to stick. Then the way back will be very difficult indeed.