Red Ed not up to job

HOW pathetic! In the tenth relaunch of his floundering leadership, Ed Miliband yesterday sought to blame ‘vested interests’ for Labour’s plummeting poll ratings and the widespread discord among his party’s MPs.

‘Between now and the election they are going to use every tactic to try to destabilise, distract us and throw us off course’, he said, in a speech in which the man who was called a quasi-Marxist by the New Statesman – that house journal of the Left – painted every day as a constant struggle between the workers and the malign forces of capitalism.

He didn’t mention the media by name, but Mr Miliband’s aides made clear that one of his targets was the Right-wing Press, who they blame for whipping-up last week’s mini-putsch by a cabal of disgruntled MPs.

This, of course, is deluded nonsense. The real trigger for the crisis was the blistering article in the New Statesman which labelled Mr Miliband an ‘ old- style Hampstead socialist’ and the Left-leaning BBC reporting that backbenchers had begun calling upon him to quit.

In truth, yesterday’s speech – dripping with paranoia – was full of class war, quasiMarxist rhetoric, as he railed against energy companies, ‘the markets’ and ‘the privileged few’.

There was no recognition it was his own party that plunged millions of families into hardship by failing properly to regulate the banks and presiding over the worst financial crash for a lifetime.

When asked if, when he looked in the mirror, he saw a Prime Minister, Mr Miliband yesterday replied: ‘Yes.’

In reality, the reflection before him is of a puppet of the trade unions – that REAL vested interest in British politics – who the overwhelming majority of voters have now decided will never be up to the job.