Daniel Finkelstein has written a scathing, funny response to Ed Miliband's speech to the marchers on Saturday (on which I posted briefly at the time). For those of you without a Times subscription, what follows is a taster. Finkelstein begins by quoting a famous passage from Nelson Mandela's eloquent speech to the court at his trial in 1964, in which he declared himself 'prepared to die' for his ideal of a democratic and free society in South Africa. As Finkestein reminds us:
An entire lifetime in prison lay ahead of him. I feel sure that Madiba would have phrased his appeal differently if the ideal he was defending was the funding for Staines Citizens’ Advice Bureau. On Saturday, just after lunch, Ed Miliband addressed the TUC march against the cuts. An entire afternoon in Primrose Hill Patisserie lay ahead of him. He compared his “struggle” (yes, I promise you, he really did call it that) to those embarked upon by the suffragettes, the civil rights movement in America’s deep South and Mandela’s African National Congress (he left out Gandhi, who is, I’m told, furious at the snub). In the process he managed to be absurd, offensive and, unintentionally, highly revealing.
The extent of the absurdity hardly needs further elaboration. But allow me. To use some of the great, bold and brave political campaigns of the 20th century to describe a walk between Victoria Embankment and Hyde Park (which Mr Miliband boldly and bravely didn’t actually go on, nipping in and out for his own speech) was preposterous...
... It is not only silly for a candidate to be Prime Minister at the head of 258 Members of Parliament to talk of his “struggle”. It is also grossly inappropriate. All the causes to which he refers — he described himself as “standing on the shoulders of those who have marched and struggled for great causes in the past” — were, necessarily, campaigns of defiance against the rule of law. Mr Miliband seeks the opportunity to make laws and to enforce them.
Finkelstein goes on to say that although Miliband is surely not, as Boris Johnson alleged, guilty of being pleased with the violence that occurred on Saturday, his rhetoric was doubly misjudged when he knew violence was a possibility.
I'm just really, really surprised and baffled that he thought those grandiloquent comparisons appropriate. Is there no-one around him to say, Oh Ed, come off it...?
Wasn't his father a marxist intellectual? it probably doesn't seem overblown to him then, his whole mindset is probably one of perpetual 'struggle' against someone or something.
As if that weren't irritating enough, some of us poor folk in central London were awoken in the early hours of Saturday by idiots outside the window with megaphones. Anyone listening who wasn't already a believer in the smallest State possible would abruptly have become one.
Posted by: ejoch | March 30, 2011 at 03:37 PM