Originally posted @ 2:13 pm, Tue 11th Jan 2011
8 points in the lead! Wooah! It's only a ComRes poll. Really not sure it counts.
But, still, a bit of a result given the criticism of Ed Miliband. He's been too quiet apparently. Or maybe he's just got a sense of the long game.
And the long game includes pointing out that you can't bang on about being tough on banker's bonuses and about being all in this together, and then as commentators have put it, acquiesce. (Hope I've spelt that right.)
Ah, says the ITN political editor, but when I asked him how much higher the tax on bankers' bonuses should be, Ed Miliband refused to say. Quite why a big point can't be made with a wodge of detail, I'm not clear. But the subtext is - none of them can be trusted. Please save us from these would be celebrities and their cant about politicians.
The debate on the shooting in Arizona is moving on to politicians falling out over the causes for the shooting. I was surprised the Sheriff was so outspoken so early, when he said the political culture was wrong. But that was what he said, rather than saying it was the cause of what happened (cos as we know, we don't know what drove Lee Loughner to do what he did; although the British would always say allowing so many people to be licensed to carry guns makes such a massacre so much easier).
By the political culture being wrong, we can point to people characterising Barack Obama as being a babykiller (see the BBC's Justin Webb in today's Daily Mirror). We can point to the gun targets graphic on Sarah Palin's web-site only being taken down after the shooting.
We can also point to people not being able to rehearse quickly enough the defining features of a free society in which politics plays the leading role.
Maybe the true memorial to Christina Taylor Green, the nine-year-old born on 9/11 and probably felt a bit of that burden as she stood to represent her class in school government, that we create a new character of engagement that says why politics is important and how we should respect each other as we do it. And whilst some of the inevitable consequences of such codes are some of the esoteric behaviours of MPs in parliamentary debates, we might just get a better appreciation of what makes a better and a freer society.
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