Skip to main content

Ed Milliband on Syria: the danger of a political strategy where you expect to lose

In essence Ed Milliband's position on Syria was essentially the same as the government's. Hence he needed to lose to avoid people noticing that his position is tactical rather than based upon principle.

There are a number of principled positions. However, his position was pure oppositionism. He now faces the real difficulty that although his amendment failed he also voted against the substantive and defeated that.

How can he justify that?

Comments

SamO said…
Wrong again, stop spinning the hole is just getting deeper.
So you put down Cameron's failure to convince 60 of his own MPs (and many LDs) to vote for his own motion as a real difficulty for Ed Milliband?!
Plus you keep saying that Milliband's amendment was the same as the gov. motion- so why did the gov. not vote for it and thus at least ensure that amended motion was carried?
John Hemming said…
The motion itself was quite bland. It had been accepted that parliament was not going to approve military action.

The vote on the motion was after the vote on the amendment. Hence if someone voted for the amendment, but after that opposed the motion they need to be able to explain their reasoning from a position of principle.

John Hemming said…
Admittedly in The Telegraph, but
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/10278338/Syrian-crisis-Ed-Miliband-faces-growing-criticism-from-Labour-ranks.html

Popular posts from this blog

Its the long genes that stop working

People who read my blog will be aware that I have for some time argued that most (if not all) diseases of aging are caused by cells not being able to produce enough of the right proteins. What happens is that certain genes stop functioning because of a metabolic imbalance. I was, however, mystified as to why it was always particular genes that stopped working. Recently, however, there have been three papers produced: Aging is associated with a systemic length-associated transcriptome imbalance Age- or lifestyle-induced accumulation of genotoxicity is associated with a generalized shutdown of long gene transcription and Gene Size Matters: An Analysis of Gene Length in the Human Genome From these it is obvious to see that the genes that stop working are the longer ones. To me it is therefore obvious that if there is a shortage of nuclear Acetyl-CoA then it would mean that the probability of longer Genes being transcribed would be reduced to a greater extent than shorter ones.