That speech by Neil Kinnock

Originally published - @ 11:13 pm, Tue 30th Nov 2010

Turned up for a remembrance commemoration at the memorial in my ward on November 21st, only to find they’d started early. “A week late” you might be saying, but a real effort had been made to bring all sorts of groups together for the ceremony and march, from people who were probably at bigger events a week ago, and the attendance was much higher than I’d experienced, so a success.

More documentaries are coming out about the Second World War in particular, now that more of the armed forces own records are becoming known, including significant changes to the understanding of the success and failures of the Russian armies in the run-up to the Battle of Stalingrad. More about the battles to the north of the city that saved the city from German conquest. Only 1500 of the citizens had stayed and survived in the city when the battle was over.

Which is almost as many at the number who attended the march against cuts in services in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire the previous day. It looked so tiny. Then the BBC published an estimate of 600, not the organisers’ 1400.

Six hundred was still a fair effort given that the scale of what is to come has not been appreciated yet.

Some of the protestors called for a deficit budget to be set by the council.

Setting a deficit budget in local government is an impossible promise. Started with far-fetched resolutions. Such resolutions become pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, that is stuck to despite being outdated, misplaced and irrelevant to the real needs. It will end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

No matter how entertaining, how fulfilling to short-term egos -- you can't play politics with people's jobs and with people's services or with their homes.

Some of you will recognise the analysis and perhaps even know the actual words from the speech delivered by Neil Kinnock in 1985. http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/02/labour-militant-speech-kinnock (or see a BBC news port at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWLN7rIby9s )