Weigel

It Is Time for Both Sides to Set Aside the Rhetoric.

ITV reporter Damon Green snagged an interview with Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party. He was moved into position by handlers. He started asking questions. Cue: Disaster.

Now, what are the strikes Miliband is talking about? They’re work stoppages by as many as 750,000 public employees in protest of pension cuts from the Tory/Liberal coalition’s austerity plans. Labour’s reason to exist at the moment, and the cause for its relative popularity in polls only a year after losing power, is opposition to some austerity plans. And the Labour leader can’t speak off the cutt about this? Weak stuff. Compare it to how Neil Kinnock (destined to be remembered by Americans as “the guy Joe Biden plagiarized”) confronted a strike in 1985, defining Labour as the pro-union party that wouldn’t defend destructive strikes.

Of course, Kinnock never won a national election.