Patrick Wintour's magisterial six thousand word analysis in the Guardian today of the decline and fall of Ed Miliband

There was praise on Daily Politics this lunchtime for Patrick Wintour's magisterial six-thousand-word analysis in the Guardian today of the decline and fall of Ed Miliband and his coterie:  http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/03/undoing-of-ed-miliband-and-how-labour-lost-election

Some thoughts:

"Greg Beales, the campaign’s director of strategy – and the keeper of the party’s polling – was convinced that, above all, the party needed to address the distrust of Labour’s legacy on the economy and immigration" - the Labour party is addicted to immigration and they are still in denial on what ordinary people think about the issue.

"Stewart Wood, a former politics tutor at Magdalen College Oxford, pressed Miliband to make an ideological break with New Labour, and concentrate the campaign on a promise to make society more equal, through reforms to banking, markets, and post-crash capitalism" - the need for a break with the past is fundamental, but needs to be more far-reaching than just reform the banks, moderate the markets and offer a few restraints on the big predators.

"the Tories had successfully established the deficit as the most important issue of the day" - not sure they did (the Tories were bloody lucky during the last election).

"the consensus was for Balls – although, as a compromise, Miliband was asked to approach his brother one more time. Sitting on the backbenches, a bruised David said no once again" - my goodness, did David Miliband contribute to the Labour defeat due to his bruised ego?

"Unless Miliband could present the public with a bigger and more inspiring message, Axelrod told him, it would be impossible to regain the support of the white working-class voters who were deserting the Labour party" - well that was advice worth paying for - Mr Axelrod earned his fee for this insight alone.

 “The agenda would have been about a second Tory term” – and what that might mean for the NHS, Europe, tax credits and Scotland. Instead, it turned into a referendum on the risks of a minority Labour government - but in many ways the general election was the English response to the Scottish referendum of the previous September (and we can paraphrase this as:  you Scots hate us therefore we are going to hate you).

 

"After the election, the party drew up two plans for its disposal: one was simply to smash the stone up and throw the rubble onto a scrap heap. The second was to break it up and sell chunks" - if it is not destroyed that stone is going to haunt Labour - I certainly suggest UKIP buys the bit of the stone that refers to immigration.

"the party’s wariness to discuss identity or Englishness" - this is a statement of the bleedin' obvious.