Crash Bang Wallace
Libertarian political blog from Mark Wallace; political opinion, breaking news and exclusivesThe Ed/David Media Mili-Mix-Up Part III
Posted on July 18, 2011Despite the big impact he’s generally recognised to have made on the hacking issue over the last fortnight, it seems Ed Miliband is still having some serious recognition issues even among the political media. After the Today Programme and the internet itself mixed him up with his brother David, and the Telegraph did the same, the effect is spreading.
Guido picked up on the Daily Mirror’s Mili-mixup:
Now the BBC website has managed to follow suit in their live coverage of PMQs:
This is quite funny, but it leaves Labour with a serious question: if even now, at the height of his performance, journalists mix up Ed Miliband with David Miliband what hope is there that the public know who he is?
Ed Miliband trapped in a Final Destination film
Posted on July 01, 2011In the Final Destination films, whenever someone cheats death the universe immediately starts trying to correct their lucky escape by killing them off. It know seems increasingly likely that this is happening to Ed Miliband – fate clearly never meant him to become Labour leader, he beat David by accident and now the universe is trying to set its mistake right.
A few weeks ago the Today Programme mixed the two up, and I noted that no less an authority than the internet has no idea who Ed is. Yesterday, the Independent revealed that millions of voters shown a photo of Ed would identify it as David Miliband.
Now even the Telegraph has started doing it, reporting in its coverage of the Inverclyde by-election that:
The Labour leader, David Miliband echoed Mr McKenzie’s sentiments and went further saying that the Labour win showed how disillusioned the public were about the coalition government’s handling of the economy.
How long can it be before the forces of fate and nature set right this mistake and put David Miliband in charge? When will Ed reach his Final Destination?
Profiling Ed Balls’ personality through his pig doodle
Posted on June 12, 2011There’s a simple personality profiling test called the Pig Test. You draw a doodle of a pig, and the way you do so is used to give a sketch outline of your personality type. (If you want to take the test yourself, please draw a pig now, because the details in the rest of this post will otherwise influence your results). It’s not perfect, but it’s an amusing little way to give a broadbrush insight into what you or your friends are like.
How convenient, then, that the Ed Balls Files released by the Telegraph this week feature a doodle of a pig drawn by Ed Balls himself:
So according to the rules of the Pig Test, what does it tell us about Ed Balls’ personality?
First, the doodle is located at the top of the page, which apparently should mean “you are perceived as a positive
and optimistic person by others.” (I did say it wasn’t perfect).
Next, we look at the direction the pig is facing – Ed’s piggywig is looking out of the page directly at us, indicating “you are a direct person; [you] neither fear nor avoid discussion and enjoy “stirring the pot” to promote change.”
The doodle also has more detail than you would normally expect in a picture of a cartoon pig, which means “you see yourself as analytical and cautious. Others must work hard to earn your trust and to keep it.”
The fact the pig has two rather than four legs indicates a sense of insecurity, that “you are living through a period of major change in your life”.
The pig’s ears aren’t unusually large or unusually small, so far as I can see that means Ed is a fairly good listener.
Finally, and most tellingly, there’s the tail. According to the rules of the Pig Test, “the longer the pig’s tail that you have drawn (including loops) the more satisfied you are with the quality of your personal relationships”.
It speaks for itself that Ed Balls’ pig has no tail at all.
Ed who?
Posted on May 04, 2011John Humphrys must be a bit embarrassed by his Mili-mix-up on the Today programme this morning, ending his interview with the Labour leader by calling him “David Miliband”. But Humph shouldn’t be too worried – he was only channeling the general opinion that David is better than Ed Miliband.
For some galling proof, if you Google “miliband”, you get David first:
Even more galling for Ed must be the results if you do the same thing on Google Images:
Ed Miliband? Who?
Ed Balls – from Green Tax Crusader to Jeremy Clarkson
Posted on March 14, 2011Ed Balls has evidently decided that hammering the Coalition on rising fuel duty and the double-tax on fuel through VAT is the right way to go. Politically, it’s a clever choice – the levels of tax faced by motorists are punitively high, it does harm the economy and it means ordinary taxpayers are often punished for making essential trips to work or to the shops – particularly in rural areas.
Essentially, he is shifting – at least partially – into TaxPayers’ Alliance messaging, casting himself as being on the side of the strivers, the strugglers and the just-getting-by. Heck, he even confessed this morning that maybe the previous Government might have wasted some money, an acknowledgement that seems obvious to the rest of us but is a groundshaking revelation when it comes from Balls.
As well as being political good sense, this is also part of a growing decontamination strategy that Labour are pursuing to shed the negative associations of the stealth taxes and squandered billions of 1997-2010.
The question with any decontamination strategy is “Will it work?”
With Ed Balls, you’ve got to wonder if even his powers of self-delusion will succeed this time. Today, he is an opponent for economic and moral reasons of hammering motorists. In his pomp helping to present and defend the Budget back in 2007, though, he was boasting about the ethical worthiness of, erm, hammering motorists:
That is exactly what we have been doing over the past 10 years with action to shift the tax burden from “goods” to “bads”, and with the work that we have done to support and, indeed, to pioneer international emissions control and trading. In the Budget, we have set out further actions to advance the environment agenda, including…a fuel duty increase of more than inflation
Is it really believable that the Ed Balls who spent a decade squeezing and squeezing motorists until the pips squeaked because driving was “bad” has now seen sense and is fighting on the motorists’ side? It’s about as plausible as Jeremy Clarkson being elected as the next leader of the Green Party.
EXCLUSIVE: Ed Miliband “told BBC he knew nothing about Tunisia”
Posted on March 08, 2011The question of whether British politicians have got a good enough handle on the uprisings in North Africa is increasingly occupying the minds of political commentators. Against that background, I was recently told a fascinating snippet from someone inside the BBC which casts further doubt on whether Westminster is up to speed.
It goes a little something like this…
When Ed Miliband appeared on the Andrew Marr Show back on 16th January, he arrived for makeup beforehand, plonked himself down in the chair and announced “By the way, what’s been happening in Tunisia? I know absolutely nothing about it.”
A slightly shocked silence ensued, with the BBC staff present dually wondering a) how on earth he hadn’t been briefed for a major interview on unrest that by then had been running for a month and had in the previous two days led to the Tunisian President fleeing into exile, and b) whether they should prep Marr to grill him on it as a weak point.
As it turned out, for whatever reason Marr didn’t ask about the topic at all – but it hardly inspires confidence that Ed didn’t know about the topic and, more worryingly for Labour, just merrily announced that he didn’t to the staff of the BBC’s major political chatshow.
I should say at this point that this is single-sourced (albeit from a person who was apparently there at the time) , so it’s further to the tittle-tattle end of the news scale than the hard-copy-leaked-document end, but interesting nonetheless.
EU cracks open in Westminster and Fleet Street
Posted on February 28, 2011For those interested in eurosceptic politics, there are some serious rumblings under way in the Westminster jungle. The tectonic plates of Westminster perception are starting to shift – almost imperceptibly, but it’s still happening and it’s not unreasonable to read into their movement some hope for the future.
Politics is as much about perception as about reality. There have been polls for ages showing the public dislike of Brussels, and the true harm being done to the economy and our legal system is well-documented. Despite that, the feeling has persisted in the Westminster Village that no-one is interested, or worse that discussing the issue marks one out as toxic. That’s due to all sorts of factors, not least the feedback loop of people who think that telling their friends that it is so, who then reinforce their own assumption and so on ad infinitum.
But now cracks are starting to appear in those assumptions. When The Freedom Association launched the Better Off Out campaign in 2006, its aim was not to convert every MP overnight but to demonstrate that the doomsayers were mistaken.
By proving that the sky did not fall in on the heads of Philip Davies, Philip Hollobone or Douglas Carswell, they started a process of erosion that has seen many other MPs feel free to speak out on the topic. There are now 21 MPs as well as numerous MEPs, councillors and Members of the Northern Irish Assembly who are signed up.
Davies, Hollobone and Carswell turned marginal seats at 2005 into hefty majorities in 2010 despite or because of their EU views – they drank from a supposedly poisoned chalice and they are in hearty health.
Others in Parliament are yet to come out against the whole project but now feel more free to speak out and act against the EU more generally – a trend most notable in the recent snub to the European Court of Human Rights over votes for prisoners.
Things are changing on the pro-EU side, too. It’s long been the case that those opposed to Brussels want a referendum, while those in favour of the EU either oppose one entirely or promise it and then dodge around their commitment later.
That situation, too, seems to be changing. Sunder Katwala of the Fabian Society recently came out in favour of an In/Out referendum, whilst reporting that the Shadow Europe Minister Wayne David has said it’s on the table for Labour’s policy review. David and Katwala have been joined by Keith Vaz, another of the EU’s prominent cheerleaders.
On the other side of the debate, James Forsyth has reported that Coalition Ministers (even Liberal Democrats) have started realising to their horror quite how much the EU binds their hands in Government. If you’d asked me a few months ago whether Oliver Letwin would ever be reported to be thinking that maybe Britain should leave the European project, I’d have laughed you out of town – nevertheless, Forsyth reports exactly that.
There is a third leg to the policy tripod, though. If MPs’ assumptions in the Commons change, and Ministers start to want the same thing, they are still unlikely to act unless public opinion will be on their side. They need to see that voters will not just not mind but actually reward them for taking a particular step.
This is already being tested by the Daily Express’ adoption of a Better Off Out position, which serves a similar role to Better Off Out MPs in breaking open the market of ideas on Fleet Street. For those that may scoff at the Express’s influence, don’t forget that they were early adopters in helping the TaxPayers’ Alliance break into the market and eventually establish a level of profile that distinctly irks the TPA’s critics. In the old story, the boy who pointed out that the Emperor was naked was just a kid, and yet he still managed to smash a farcical illusion held by the entire Royal Court.
The question is whether other papers or commentators will follow the Express’s lead. The first hint of that possibility appeared this weekend on the Twitter feed of the Express’s Patrick O’Flynn, where he said that on days where they go big on the EU “definitely put sales up” for the paper.
To change the politics of the EU debate, we need to sweep away a deeply entrenched system of perception and assumption. The cracks are showing in Parliament, the stubborn obstructionism of our opponents is starting to break down, Fleet Street’s unanimity is broken and – crucially – there are signs that there may be sales and votes in the issue.
Make no mistake about it, the plates are shifting.
The genius of Tumblr
Posted on January 14, 2011Tumblr photoblogs are one of the glorious, niche pleasures of the internet. My favourite is still probably the hilarious “Kim Jong Il Looking At Things” but there’s a new kid on the block which is a close second.
I present for your delectation, “Awkward Ed Miliband Moments” – which, among other classics, gives me an opportunity to repost this:
