Leadership battle as flat as a Mil-pond

LIFE AND OTHER BITS:

DOES anyone really care who wins the Labour Party leadership contest?

Does anyone actually find any of the contestants anything much more than boringly anonymous?

Oldham’s Labour activists — both of them — seem to have tied their tattered socialist banner to Ed Miliband’s campaign but they probably made their decision by drawing the name out of a hat (more likely a cloth cap).

The pundits say that David Miliband, the elder of the two dull as ditchwater brothers is favourite to win, despite the fact that he wants to be a second Tony Blair (maybe all the money the ex-PM has made since his retirement has something to do with that) but do we really want another Blair, the biggest political disappointment since Michael Foot’s brief tenure as PM?

In fact, the one claim to fame that Gordon Brown has to his credit and the only good deed he ever did for his so-called former friend is that his time in number 10 gave Tony the appearance of a political giant, destined for sainthood. Yes, Brown really was that bad.

The younger Miliband does at least seem determined to distance himself from both Brown and Blair (a flash of wisdom there) and talks about Labour going back to its roots. Whether that means nationalisation, winters of discontent, devaluing of the pound and hard times all round we can’t really say.

But, ominously, as if standing (on chairs) to join in the same old hymn, the former giants of the Trade Union movement, posturing pygmies now most of them, are rattling the rusty sabres and dusting off old and faded rule books and threatening revolution and rubbish on the streets.

Don’t be surprised if that superannuated mouth on legs, Arthur Scargill adds his voice to the chorus.

The also-ran candidates, Andy Burnham, Diane Abbott, and Ed Balls are probably only in the contest in an effort to make it interesting.

They have failed — and miserably, too.



THE scourge of the supermarket self-serve tills is spreading. The good folk of Saddleworth will face their own torture by faceless voice when the new Tesco opens in Greenfield in the New Year. They, too, will have to become familiar with cries of “Unidentified object in the baggage area.” The self-serve tills are OK in the lunchtime rush for a butty, a red pepper and a Chronicle but if you have a trolley full of shopping beware!




FINAL WORD: Isn’t there some dark irony in Tony Blair cancelling a book signing in London after having a few eggs and shoes thrown at him? This from the man who took our troops into two wars.