The worst type of parochial, faux 'internationalism'

It would be overly-generous to talk about the "meat" of Ed Miliband's speech to the Scottish Labour conference the other day, but if such a thing existed it was probably this -

"I believe, and I believe that people across the United Kingdom believe,

That we owe obligations to each other.

That the successful Scottish entrepreneur owes obligations to the child born into poverty in London, and the pensioner in Wales."

Which begs the obvious question - does a successful Scottish or English entrepreneur also owe an equal obligation to a child born into poverty in Lisbon, and to a pensioner in Wallonia? And if not, why not? If Miliband's belief in solidarity is real and not as synthetic as most of us suspect, why isn't he arguing for a single European or world state within which to redistribute wealth to the maximum extent possible?

I've tried asking Labour supporters these questions recently, and the only answers that have been forthcoming have been along the lines of "we are where we are" and "the UK exists", and frankly if that's the best they can come up with, this argument is going absolutely nowhere. The rhetoric of Miliband and Alexander can only really make sense when viewed through a British Nationalist prism. Just like the SNP, they draw a line around a group of people and say that the social democratic contract should apply only between those people - and yet because that line is a different line to the SNP's and is drawn around a different group of people, they somehow expect us to believe that their kind of nationalism is more morally virtuous. Douglas Alexander evidently feels some kind of saintly glow when he addresses an audience in Cardiff and tells them that he doesn't see "foreigners" staring back at him. But why on earth would "Johnny Foreigner" be the first thing that pops into his head when he meets someone from Paris or Dublin? Why wouldn't he just see a fellow citizen of the EU, or even more fundamentally another human being?

I'm sure the likes of Duncan Hothersall and any others who are still wedded to the quaint idea that Labour is an "international movement" must be thrilled by all the recent talk of solidarity, but Alexander gives the game away. A belief in solidarity that is strictly limited to 'Fortress Britain' is the worst type of parochial, faux 'internationalism', reminiscent of those who used to fondly imagine that the Home Nations football competition was the real world championship. And, even more to the point, it's a type of solidarity that doesn't actually work. So when Miliband asks -

"And if we believe in the idea of Scotland as a progressive beacon, why would we turn our back on the redistributive union - the United Kingdom?"

- the obvious reponse is to inquire where the redistribution actually is within that union. We've now had thirty-three years of right-wing and centre-right Westminster governments opposed to the redistribution of wealth. The Labour administration that Miliband was part of had a leader who cheerfully boasted that he didn't give a damn that the gap between rich and poor was continuing to widen. And Miliband's own recent pandering to right-wing opinion in the south of England by accepting the Tory cuts (a stance which renders his bizarre claim that the SNP are "doubling the cuts" pathetic as well as nonsensical) is further proof that the cause of progressivism requires that this union should end as soon as possible, not be defended to the death. By opposing independence, Miliband is not merely legitimising ongoing Tory rule in Scotland, he is legitimising a political culture that holds that a successful Scottish entrepreneur has no real obligations to the poor and vulnerable at all. Not in Livingston, not in London, not in Lisbon, not anywhere.

Independence would in fact lead to a net increase in progressivism in these islands. The rest of the UK would unfortunately still be governed by the Tories or by Tory-Lites in other parties, but we know that's going to be the case anyway. Why should vulnerable Scottish pensioners have to suffer for Miliband's narrow British nationalism?

Nice try, Ed, but here's why independence would be a boost for progressivism beyond the borders of Scotland

We can safely assume that when the referendum campaign gets underway properly, Labour will revert to their familiar comfort zone of fear-mongering. But for the time being, Ed Miliband is experimenting with some rather more high-minded rhetoric about Scotland and the rest of the UK standing together to achieve social justice. Well, that would be simply marvellous, Ed, but for one small problem - it doesn't actually work. The last authentically left-of-centre government at UK level was the Callaghan government in 1979. Since then, Labour have only succeeded in winning elections by having a leader who brazenly claimed that the rising wealth gap between the rich and the poor didn't matter. With every other Labour leader, it's been Tory victories all the way. Why else do Miliband and Balls feel compelled to tack right at present?

In reality, independence would be a boon for progressive politics both at home and further afield, for the following reasons -

1) A progressive government in Scotland would take control of the welfare and tax systems.

2) This huge advance would happen while making a negligible impact on the chances of what might laughably be called "progressive forces" gaining power in the rest of the UK. Contrary to the mythology, Labour would have secured nearly all of their post-war election victories with or without Scotland. The outcomes of the 1997, 2001 and 2005 elections would have been the same.

3) Scotland's direct votes in the European Union institutions would mean that the progressive voting bloc would increase, and the conservative voting bloc (of which the UK has been a loyal part under both Tory and New Labour governments alike) would slightly decrease. This would be of benefit to under-privileged people in Liverpool or London (or Lisbon for that matter) every bit as much as to under-privileged people in Glasgow.

4) The overseas aid contribution of what is currently the UK would probably increase, due to the likelihood of a higher per capita aid budget being put in place by an independent Scottish government.

The latter point is especially important, because by praying in aid the need for social justice but only within this small island, Miliband betrays the narrowness of his own British nationalism. If he thinks that you can only be called progressive if you believe in North Sea oil revenues being shared across Britain (where of course its main effect has been to bankroll Thatcherism), how exactly can you be called a progressive if you don't support North Sea oil revenues being shared across Europe, or indeed the entire world? His argument can only have any credibility if he ditches his British nationalism and supports a single European or world state - which unsurprisingly he shows no sign of doing.

In a world of nation states, lines are drawn around people who say "these are our own resources, which we primarily use to benefit our own country". Alex Salmond, Ed Miliband and David Cameron all believe in that world. The philosophy is identical - except of course that Alex Salmond believes in a much fairer distribution of income at home, and a much more generous engagement with the wider world. As the great R B Cunninghame Graham (the UK's first socialist member of parliament and a founding member of the SNP) once said : "without nationalism, there can be no internationalism". I'd go one step further, and say that without progressive nationalism, there can be no progressive internationalism. It's a fundamental building-block - but unfortunately the British nationalism exhibited by the unionist parties at present is broadly regressive in nature.

The alternative is obvious.

The most important advice Ed Miliband will ever read

From 'Sophie', in a comment on the New Statesman blogs -

"Ed is doing the right thing by focusing on England as that is where the election is going to be won or lost; home as it is to 85%+ of the UK population. Once elected I'm sure he will get around to meeting the winner but remembering obscure contenders in Scotland is like remembering the opposition group leader names on English councils. Scotland does not matter."

I strongly urge Ed Miliband to pin these words on his bathroom wall, and recite them to himself every morning. This is definitely the way forward.

Hang on, what am I talking about, he's doing it anyway.

Miliband gives ringing endorsement to, you know, that guy

Some news stories are beyond satire. From the Press Association (or possibly from a script for The Thick of It) -

"There are three not very well-known candidates," said the BBC interviewer. "What do you know about them and can you name them?"

Mr Miliband replied: "I think we have got three great hitters. I think we have got three people who are determined to show that they can make a difference, that they can make a difference to the people of Scotland."

Interviewer: "Can you name the three of them?" Mr Miliband: "Look, what I say is, there is Tom Harris, there is Johann Lamont and a third candidate who is also putting himself forward."

Interviewer: "He is the front-runner, Ken Macintosh." Mr Miliband: "Ken Macintosh, yes."

Interviewer: "He is the front-runner but you can't name him." Mr Miliband: "No, look, Ken Macintosh is going to be an excellent candidate."

* * *

"Can you name the three of them?"

"Look, what I say is : No."

Of course, Miliband recently informed us that our elected First Minister isn't that big a figure in Westminster, and when people want to know what is really going on in Scotland, they instead turn to the obvious political colossus - Ann McKechin. Hmmm. Perhaps Mr Miliband ought to reflect on whether he might be going astray there, because I think we can safely assume that Alex Salmond is considerably better informed on the Scottish Labour leadership contest than the UK Labour leader presently appears to be.

It's also worth pointing out that Miliband's seeming reliance on the not exactly objective source of McKechin for obtaining his hazy information on this far-off land of ours is eerily reminiscent of the story of how Michael Heseltine came to vote in favour of imposing the poll tax on Scotland but not on England, as mischievously recounted by Donald Dewar in the House of Commons. A Lib Dem MP enquired whether Dewar had heard that the reason Heseltine voted the way he did was that he - amazingly - thought the Scottish people wanted the poll tax. Dewar replied : "It's worse than that. What he actually did was ask the Secretary of State [Malcolm Rifkind] whether the people of Scotland wanted it - and he believed the answer."

The Clarke episode illustrates everything that is wrong with our politics

I feel slightly queasy embarking on a post defending a Tory cabinet minister (let alone one of the Thatcher vintage), but here goes anyway. Having finally heard the relevant extract from Ken Clarke's now-notorious radio interview, it's quite clear that his mouth did run away with him, and he ultimately said something extremely stupid. But a fair amount of the blame for a train-wreck of an interview must lie with Victoria Derbyshire, who by the sounds of things fancies herself as the Paxman of Radio Five Live, and who barely gave Clarke the space to complete a word, let alone a sentence. In his losing battle to quell Ms Derbyshire's sneers, he blurted out in mangled form a couple of points - one of which was outrageous and I trust he didn't mean, but the other of which actually had a degree of validity, however poorly expressed. The latter was his reference to a scenario where two teenagers very close in age have consensual sex, but this is defined as rape because one of the two is just over the age of consent, and the other is just below it. Clarke's mistake was to imply that such cases are 'less serious rape', whereas what he should have been querying is whether they should really be treated as rape at all. Apart from anything else (and to return to a topic I've touched on in the past), it's hard to imagine that many seventeen-year-old girls are ever charged with rape for having consensual sex with boys who are just short of their sixteenth birthday, and yet the principle is absolutely identical.

Where Clarke said something reprehensible and didn't simply mis-speak was in his implication that date-rape is not "serious rape". But, even so, bearing in mind that this was a garbled, poorly-thought-through comment in the context of an absurdly belligerent interview, the fact that Ed Miliband immediately piled in and demanded Clarke's instant resignation tells you everything you need to know about what is wrong with our politics. And if that wasn't enough, we then had Labour MP Bridget Phillipson on Channel 4 News declaring that Clarke's modest efforts to reorient the criminal justice system towards rehabilitation and the reduction of reoffending meant that he was 'on the side of rapists and violent criminals'. Given that those words were clearly pre-planned and carefully considered, in many ways I regard them as far more offensive than the stupid things Clarke found himself saying under pressure.

What happens when voters with 'nowhere else to go' have somewhere else to go?

From the fateful day in May that the Lib Dems turned their back on the possibility of a progressive coalition and entered a Tory-led government instead (admittedly partly as a result of the antics of Labour neanderthals such as John Reid and Tom Harris), I've been fairly pessimistic about the impact on Scottish voting trends. It seemed obvious that Labour would prosper as the default anti-Tory option for many Scots. But there is a more positive way of looking at it as well, as indirectly identified by Fraser Nelson in the Spectator's Coffee House -

"Some 51 percent now disapprove of the coalition government. Who do they vote for? Coalition has granted Labour monopoly control of opposition."

Not everywhere it hasn't - and in these parts, of course, that 51% figure is a lot higher. The opposition ranks (in Westminster terms) have indeed been squeezed in Scotland - but to two, not one, and that presents an opportunity for both opposition parties. I suspect in many parts of Scotland, the SNP is still a more attractive option than Labour for disaffected Lib Dems (and indeed Tories). Nelson is probably right - for once - that the 'where else do you go?' logic will soon see Ed Miliband in a commanding position south of the border, but it's just possible the effect in Scotland will be somewhat more complex.

Could child benefit be Cameron's poll tax?

I've just caught up with the first PMQs duel between Cameron and Miliband, and it was startling to see just how easily the new Labour leader was allowed to score a hit on the issue of families with only one working parent being effectively discriminated against as a result of the threshold for the withdrawal of child benefit. Miliband's jibe that the Prime Minister "had no defence" was quite literally true. That marks a change, though, because the government did have a defence on the day the policy was announced - Philip Hammond breezily accepted on Newsnight that there would be a little "rough justice", but insisted that was unavoidable if the costs and complications of full-scale means-testing were to be avoided. It seems the penny has dropped that this wasn't such a winning line - but the fact that they haven't been able to come up with anything better in the intervening week is extremely telling. Cameron instead rather lamely answered the question he wished he'd been asked, and defended the general principle of withdrawing benefits from the wealthy.

In truth, of course, this isn't "a little" rough justice - as Miliband noted, there will be hundreds of thousands of families with a single working parent who lose out. And presumably as relative high-earners, these people are also to a significant extent natural Tory supporters. It starts to beg the question - could the controversy over the changes to child benefit be a slow-burner that eventually turns into Cameron's "poll tax"? After all, the poll tax was also a system that permitted lots of rough justice in the pursuit of maximum "simplicity". The Tories really should have learned their lesson by now - in any battle for public support between "simplicity" and "fairness", there will only ever be one winner.

*

Later in PMQs, Angus MacNeil spoke very eloquently on behalf on his constituents, the family of Linda Norgrove. Can we now expect some more ill-judged musings from Fraser Nelson on the subject of a Scottish politician getting above his station?

McKechin's appointment leaves 'the Snarl' in the spotlight

Just about the only Shadow Cabinet appointment that was utterly predictable was Ann McKechin's as Shadow Scottish Secretary - as a very low-profile Scottish MP who somehow managed to get elected to the top team, it was a no-brainer that she would draw the short straw. The most important practical upshot is that, for the first time, Iain "the Snarl" Gray has effectively become the 'real' leader of Scottish Labour, no longer in the shadow of Jim Murphy. In principle, it's of course entirely right (and long-overdue) that the Holyrood leader should have primacy - in practice, it leaves them with a rather obvious weakness.

As for the other appointments, my instinctive reaction is disappointment that Miliband has ducked out of the choice between husband and wife for the key role of Shadow Chancellor, and appointed Alan Johnson instead - that looks very much like a sop to the Blairities, and thus a step backwards.

Sorry, Matt - Angus MacNeil and Stewart Hosie are both in the pink!

Now that Ed Miliband has moved Labour onto the ground occupied by many Liberal Democrat members and voters (if not necessarily the current party leadership), it's encouraging to see that a conversation has started over at Liberal Democrat Voice about the possibility of ditching the coalition with the Tories before this parliament is out. Matt Gallagher raises a very interesting prospect, and one which hasn't received enough attention thus far - what will be the psychological impact if, as seems highly likely, Labour at some point make enough by-election gains to enable them (theoretically) to form a coalition with the Lib Dems without the support of the nationalist parties? If by that stage there are opinion polls showing massive disapproval ratings for the Tory/Lib Dem administration, and perhaps even majority support for an alternative coalition, the enhanced arithmetical viability of that alternative might present the Lib Dems with a severe dilemma.

However, where Gallagher's argument takes a wander off into the bizarre is his suggestion that the by-election gains Labour need to trigger this scenario would come at the expense of the SNP and Plaid Cymru, rather than the Tories. I'm not sure he's thought that one through - perhaps he was misled by the frequency of Labour/SNP by-election battles in the last parliament? Anyway, I left this comment -

"For the life of me I can’t see why Matt is thinking of by-election gains from the nationalist parties rather than the Tories. As far as the SNP are concerned Labour would only have a theoretical chance in two of the six seats, and what are the statistical chances of either of those falling vacant? Angus Brendan MacNeil and Stewart Hosie are both in the pink as far as I’m aware!

The truth is that the arithmetic for a progressive coalition is already there, because the nationalists would be happy to give it a fair wind. But, sadly, some Lib Dems were determined to promote the narrative that “the numbers simply aren’t there” in order to justify their unholy alliance with the Tories, and a number of Labour neanderthals did the same because they were so horrified by the idea of having to work with other parties. 'Purity or death' is the mantra for the likes of John Reid and Tom Harris."

A little less conversation, a lot more numbers please

A few days ago, Political Betting stalwart John Loony shared a very funny letter he had written to the BBC, complaining bitterly about their decision to allow Emily Maitlis and Nick Robinson to talk over the announcement of the Labour leadership result, first with Robinson's extrapolation (ahem) that David Miliband had won based on the result of the first count, and then with an explanation of the electoral college system. Here's an excerpt...

"Yet the presenters of the programme decided to start squawking and prattling all through the declaration of the second round, in a way which prevented us from hearing the result being declared, apparently to explain the workings of the Electoral College system and the Alternative Vote system. This was in spite of the fact that every single viewer was, by definition, interested in hearing the result; every single viewer was, by definition, already fully familiar with the way the EC and AV systems worked; and the fact that anybody who did not know or understand how the system worked was, by definition, not watching the programme in the first place. The presenters knew these facts before they started speaking."

Of course in one sense John is entirely wrong - while most people watching would certainly have been interested in hearing the result, that doesn't mean to say that they had the slightest clue about how the labyrinthine electoral system worked. This is an argument I've had on PB many times before - many posters there seem to feel that the BBC makes far too many concessions to its audience's assumed ignorance during election results programmes. But we political obsessives don't 'own' those programmes - everyone has a stake in the selection of a potential future PM, and it's entirely appropriate that a more casual audience is equipped with the information they need to make sense of what is happening. And if Nick Robinson felt strongly that he had advance information about which way the result was going, there was probably also a case for allowing him to communicate that to the viewers. So I'd suggest the real mistakes made were as follows -

1. The presenters' total silence during the result of the first count gave the impression that they were going to remain quiet for the duration. That maximised the irritation when they suddenly started drowning out the result, and then didn't stop. For my own part, I fully expected that the interruption was going to be very brief, and by the time I realised that I really was going to have to switch over to Sky I had already missed the entire result of the second count.

2. Any explanation of the intricacies of the electoral college system should have occurred well before the announcement of the result. Explaining it while the result was being read out almost seemed to be sending the patronising message : "this is why we're not bothering to let you listen, because as you can see it's all very complicated and you probably wouldn't understand it anyway".

3. Any extrapolations or other nuggets of information from Robinson should have been delivered by a caption on the screen, rather than by voiceover. This is standard practice during the live broadcast of the Budget, for instance - the BBC wouldn't dream of talking over the Chancellor while he's on his feet, no matter how incomprehensible the contents of the speech.

4. Robinson should really have done his homework better on how to extrapolate the result from the first count. He seemed to have only looked at the party members' and MPs' sections, and just assumed that David Miliband's stronger than anticipated showing there was being replicated in the unions' section. A much simpler and more reliable way of approaching it would have been to look at the percentage gap between the two brothers in the overall electoral college - I gather there were people in the hall who instantly said "Ed's won" upon hearing that the gap was just 3%.

We interrupt this optimistic broadcast to bring you a snarl...

In line with my disquieting new habit of feeling something approximating to goodwill towards the UK Labour leader, I actually found myself watching a Labour Party Political Broadcast this evening without any discernible steam coming out of my ears. That is, until Iain "the Snarl" Gray popped up uninvited midway through (in a clumsily inserted Scottish Labour 'opt-out' from the main broadcast) to make this utterly extraordinary comment -

"Over the last three-and-a-half years, the SNP have broken every single promise they have ever made."

Whether or not it's true that Ed Miliband "gets" Scotland, it's depressingly clear that Iain Gray does not "get" the modern Scottish electorate, and probably never will. In fact, the new contrast with Miliband's sunny disposition is simply going to make Gray's relentless carping, sourness and pointless belligerence ever more unappealing to voters. It's his enormous good fortune to find himself in the position of being favourite to become First Minister almost entirely through no actions of his own, but he could yet throw it all away with his own actions if he carries on like this.

Rest assured that there will have been seven-year-old children shaking their heads in disbelief this evening, asking their parents - "have the SNP really broken every single promise they ever made?". To which the only possible response would have been "no, darling, that man's just being a wee bit silly". If a politician repeatedly uses such stupidly overblown rhetoric, there comes a point where it's a debased currency and people just completely stop listening. Has that even occurred to Gray? It appears not. I believe that's what's known as a lack of 'emotional intelligence' - a failing Gordon Brown often used to be charged with. That was actually slightly harsh in Brown's case, but not in Gray's.

It's hard to criticise Ed Miliband for making common cause with the progressive bits of the coalition

So 72 hours and a keynote conference speech later, and it's still not entirely clear to what extent Ed Miliband represents an authentic break from New Labour. Iain Dale, for what it's worth, seems convinced that the younger brother's left-wing positioning during the leadership campaign was effectively a confidence trick, while much of the rest of the right-wing blogoshere is equally certain that we've just seen a return to a John Smith/Neil Kinnock-style Labour party. My guess is that Danny Finkelstein (someone whose analysis I usually don't have much time for) is closest to the mark in observing that, while Miliband is most certainly not "Red Ed", he is in fact slightly to the left of New Labour. If that's how his leadership pans out, my verdict would be - could be a lot better, but definite progress. It would be churlish to say otherwise.

Certainly it seems we can rest assured that the branding of the party as New Labour is now at a definitive end - Miliband used the term repeatedly in his speech, sometimes approvingly, but always in the past tense.

Despite my ambivalence over the content of the speech, I was slightly puzzled about Andrew Neil's assessment that this was an unalloyed dash back to the centre ground (what most of us in Scotland would call the centre-right), and that it was now hard to see where the differences are either with Labour's past or with the Cameron/Clegg coalition. Really? It was of course to be expected that there would be some distancing from the unions, but even just off the top of my head, can you imagine Tony Blair saying that :

* There should be a living wage over and above the national minimum wage?

* The gap between rich and poor does matter, and that the most equal societies are the most successful?

* The Iraq war was a mistake, was not a war of last resort, and undermined the UN?

* Civil liberties (or, as Blair used to put it, "that civil libertarian nonsense") have been too far eroded in the name of the war on terror?

And as far as any shared agenda with the coalition is concerned, that was to a considerable extent confined to the areas where the current government are on the correct side of the libertarian/authoritarian divide, and where New Labour were always on the wrong side. It's scarcely a departure from progressive values to accept that Ken Clarke may have a point about the futility of short prison sentences, for instance.

But I did have a number of concerns, and by far the greatest was the fair wind Miliband seemed to be prepared to give to Iain Duncan Smith, and to the havoc he might be about to wreak on the benefits system, leaving the lives of the most vulnerable wrecked in his wake. However, the extraordinary common ground between the two parties on this area has been a constant for a decade-and-a-half now, so I suppose we can't expect miracles. Tony Blair's humiliation in seeing his successor as Labour leader join mainstream opinion in denouncing the invasion of Iraq - and receive warm applause for it from the same party conference the former PM so very recently held in the palm of his hand - will have to suffice for today.

What would OMOV actually have meant?

One of the most spectacular political conjuring tricks of recent decades occurred in 1993, when Labour somehow managed to convince the media that a new system for electing the party leader which accorded wildly different weightings to different votes - and which, furthermore, allowed many people to vote several times - could perfectly reasonably be characterised as "one member, one vote". That illusion finally seems to have worn off, with many journalists pointing out the anachronism of a few hundred parliamentarians holding a third of the entire vote, especially now that both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have a straightforward OMOV system (although of course in the Tories' case this is only part of the story, since the MPs have the absolute power to draw up a 'shortlist' of two for the members to choose from).

So, by all means Labour MPs should be stripped of their outdated special privileges. But that still doesn't really tell us what OMOV would actually mean in Labour's case, or indeed what the outcome of this particular election would have been had it applied. If only full Labour members had voted, David Miliband would have been the clear winner. But how can payers of a trade union political levy that keeps the party afloat be reasonably denied their say? So perhaps OMOV could be interpreted as meaning that the votes of trade unionists and party members should be treated absolutely equally, in which case Ed Miliband would have won in a canter. But, there again, wouldn't it be an affront to Labour members if their full membership subscription gave them no greater clout than payers of a much more modest union levy?

I'm not sure there is an elegant solution to that dilemma, but if Labour ever want their internal elections to have any sort of democratic credibility, I'd suggest that at some point they're going to have to jump one way or the other.

Trade unionists save Labour from itself

I had anticipated that if Ed Miliband was to win, he'd either have to be ahead in the members' section of the electoral college once all the preferences had been redistributed, or only very slightly behind. Clearly that was Nick Robinson's reading too, hence his intensely irritating judgement that listening to his last-minute 'forecast' of a David Miliband victory was far more important to us than the reading out of the actual result! But a much wider margin for Ed Miliband than predicted in the unions' section has essentially saved Labour from itself. One of the stark lessons of the result is just how far the composition of the Labour membership has drifted from the party's traditional roots, a phenomenon that is undoubtedly a legacy of Tony Blair's long spell as leader. But clearly the payers of the (admittedly antiquated) trade union political levy have stayed exactly where they always were. It remains to be seen whether Ed Miliband will, to slightly modify a famous phrase, "rule as a break from New Labour, having run as a break from New Labour", but if he is true to his word, it may well be that over the coming years there will be a convergence in the centre of gravity in the different segments of the Labour movement. Will the Blairite members be the ones who gradually drift off now?

And the impact on next year's Scottish election? As I suggested to Sophia on the previous thread, I'm not sure there is much of one. If there was always a depressingly significant danger of Labour making progress in May whichever Miliband had been elected (and in all honesty I think there was), we might as well relish the long-awaited day that - hopefully - draws a close to the grotesque New Labour era.

A quiet pivot in political history

So Ed Miliband has dramatically overtaken his brother as the favourite to be elected Labour leader with just hours to go. It's unclear whether the rumours fuelling this shift are based on an actual leak from the now-completed count, rather than on the general mood in each camp and on back-of-the-envelope calculations. But if the punters are right, this could be one of the most hopeful days in politics for a long time, as the conceited belief of New Labour's architects that what they had fashioned was irreversible turns out to be - at least to some extent - deluded. If, on the other hand, David Miliband prevails after all, a golden opportunity to construct some kind of meaningful alternative to Blair-Cam-Clegg-ism will have been lost, and for the foreseeable future the three London parties will continue to squabble (or, in the case of the coalition partners, swoon) over the same absurdly small piece of centre-right political turf.

Either way, then, this is a day that really matters. The Labour leadership is an elective dictatorship, and - whichever Miliband is elected - a fortysomething leader could well mean that this is the rank-and-file's one and only chance to genuinely influence the party's ideological trajectory for anything between ten and fifteen years. This is, in a sense, the UK's equivalent of the culmination of the Obama v Clinton battle in the Democratic primaries, with the winner having at least a 50% chance of becoming Prime Minister at some point in the future. Odd, then, that the country is scarcely on tenterhooks, and that in all likelihood a large percentage of the population isn't even aware that the result is about to be announced. But that's the price we pay for what has become the convention of holding party leadership ballots immediately after general elections, when public exhaustion with politics is at its peak.

UPDATE (1.40pm) : If the BBC and Sky are to be believed, it now seems pretty clear that the move in the money to the younger Miliband wasn't triggered by a specific leak from the count, as not even the interim leader Harriet Harman knows the result yet. That contradicts the earlier suggestions that she was to have been told last night, which would have been consistent with a leak. Pity.

Is Ken about to strike a blow against the cult of youth in UK politics?

If Oona King had been selected as Labour's London mayoral candidate today, and a Tory spokesman had reacted by poking fun at her gender or ethnicity, that spokesman would probably already have been fired. So why is it seemingly perfectly acceptable for him to instead sarcastically characterise Ken Livingstone as a "game old boy" who has been "exhumed" by Labour? It's hard to escape the conclusion that ageism is still considered a legitimate mine for political discourse, where racism and sexism long since ceased to be.

Even sober political observers are today wondering if Labour have made a mistake solely on the grounds of Ken's age, with Mike Smithson of Political Betting asking -

"But is Ken the right man to be the flag-bearer? In politics generally the baton is being passed to a younger generation. If Ed Miliband gets it tomorrow then Ken will be a quarter of a century older than his party leader."

Quite honestly, that consideration is gloriously irrelevant. Labour has at least an 80% chance of reclaiming the mayoralty in 2012, and that has very little to do with Ken Livingstone at all, let alone his date-of-birth or his hairline. My fears for next year's Holyrood election are primarily based on the fact that, as the party (wrongly) perceived as the "alternative to the Tories", Labour can expect to prosper when an unpopular Tory government is in power at Westminster - and that logic applies even in an election where the Tories are not their opponents. It will apply a hundred times over in part 2 of the Boris and Ken show. Hopefully one of the effects of the outcome will be to make people question their irrational assumptions about the value of always picking the younger candidate, regardless of other qualities.

Catching up...

I've just arrived back from two weeks out of the country, and quite literally the only fragment of information I've had about UK politics over that period was the tantalisingly brief sight of a headline in a British newspaper reading "Shock poll gives Ed Miliband the lead".  Having finally caught up with the figures, my gut feeling is still that David Miliband will win (on name recognition as much as anything), but could there just be a glimmer of hope that Labour is finally ready to move on from Blairism and rediscover a little of its soul?

The other snippet of news I heard overnight was the outcome of the Swedish election.  It's a supreme irony that the success of the far-right could move the administration to the left by forcing Fredrik Reinfeldt to include the Greens or the Social Democrats in his governing coalition, but of course almost the exact reverse has happened in Germany's recent past - in 2005 the left won a natural majority, but the unwillingness of the Social Democrats to work with the ex-communists necessitated a grand coalition of right and left.  I suppose some will predictably leap on results like this as an argument against PR, but the solution to extremist politics can never be to rig the ballot system - it has to be to defeat the arguments, such as they are.

Labour leadership debate : Burnt ham

When Michael Crick mused that it was very difficult to tell who had won the Newsnight leadership debate, I couldn't help wondering if what he really meant was that Diane Abbott had been the most impressive, but it felt odd to say that out loud when we know (or we think we know) that she can't win the ultimate prize. I certainly agree with Crick, though, that the one definite conclusion we can draw is that Andy Burnham lost tonight. His delivery was wooden, and the content of some of his answers was distinctly peculiar, especially on Iraq. How precisely has the invasion of Iraq made it easier to deal with Iran now? Surely the polar opposite of that statement is true. And in the unlikely event that Tony Blair was watching, his jaw would have dropped to the floor to hear Burnham advance the eccentric argument that Hans Blix's weapons inspectors couldn't be allowed more time because it might have triggered a domestic uprising against Saddam Hussein. That drives a coach and horses through Blair's perennial excuse for why it had still been justifiable to invade in the absence of WMDs - namely that Saddam would otherwise have been certain to remain in power to this day.

It also became painfully obvious tonight just what a cynical campaign Ed Balls is running, and that there's almost nothing he won't now say in an attempt to neutralise his biggest perceived weakness - ie. his closeness to Gordon Brown. Dredging up the Gillian Duffy incident just to take a swipe at his old political mentor is a tactic that thoroughly deserves to backfire, and I suspect it will. Declaring Tony Blair his favourite Labour leader was a fairly obvious affectation as well. He also coined a phrase that may one day be cited as a textbook example of how not to wriggle out of responsibility for something - "In retrospect, as I said at the time..."

The other Ed was the slightly stronger of the two Milibands, and there were plenty of signs that he is indeed consciously tacking a little to the left - by denouncing the invasion of Iraq, by pledging to tackle the gap between rich and poor, by calling 90 days detention and ID cards a mistake, and by suggesting the 50p tax band should be made permanent. As always in leadership elections, the $64,000 question is - just a tactic, or does he (to use Blair's irritating phrase) "actually believe this stuff"? If the latter, there may be just a glimmer of hope for the progressive strain of opinion in the Labour party, for the first time virtually since the day John Smith died in 1994.