John Gray writes about Ed Miliband in the New Statesman

Harsh but true - John Gray writes about Ed Miliband in the New Statesman:  http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/02/misunderstanding-present-ed-miliband-wants-govern-country-doesn-t-exist

With all the thinking Labourites distancing themselves from Ed Miliband, that only leaves the canvassing drones and the lumpen voting fodder to support the party in this election.  Their fury when they realise they have been taken for granted is going to be immense.  The Labour Party may already have passed the point at which it can reform itself.

Some quotes from John Gray:

He has often expressed admiration for Thatcher’s determination to effect radical change…

…its Scottish bastions crumbling, its support among ethnic minorities weaker, working-class voters in the English north and Wales defecting to Ukip and the Greens posing a mounting challenge on the left that could deny it seats in marginal constituencies…

Miliband is misreading British society in ways not altogether dissimilar to those that hobbled Labour in the 1980s and allowed the Conservatives to rule for nearly two decades.

It’s not that Miliband despises the world that the majority of people inhabit. He just can’t enter into it. This isn’t only his problem, of course.

Labour risks an acute form of the voter alienation that affects all the mainstream parties. It is like other parties in drawing its leaders from a narrow and privileged social stratum..

Contrary to Miliband’s Blairite critics, there is no way forward in trying to re­occupy the middle ground.

The trouble with Miliband is that he cannot speak a language that voters understand. His instinctive bent is towards a type of academic discourse that has zero popular appeal.

…speeches such as the one he gave at the Labour conference in September 2014, a dire threnody to togetherness that could have come straight from Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It.

Miliband is parroting the delusional consensus of the past few years: the belief that Britain’s long-term future is inevitably in ever closer union with a united Europe.

…it is the Conservatives who are on “the right side of history”.

Ed Miliband’s project amounts to a ragbag of populist measures.