Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Sunday, September 26, 2010

New Labour leader

The results are in.

Brother Beats Brother in Labour Vote
In a battle of brothers for the leadership of Britain’s Labour Party, the younger of the two, Ed Miliband, 40, was elected on Saturday, beating his brother David, the 45-year-old former foreign minister, by a margin of a little more than 1 percent of the votes in a runoff…

Ultimately, the leadership battle demonstrated the uneasy alliance Labour has become over the last 15 years, between the New Labour reformists, with their centrist emphasis on policies appealing to business and the middle class, and the left-wing loyalists, traditionalists who had sublimated their ideological differences with the Blairites to the common urge to return to power in 1997 after 18 years of Conservative rule…

In the end, union power decided the contest. The outcome was on a knife’s edge until the final moments because of the complexity of the party’s electoral college, which divides the leadership vote into three equal blocs — members of the British and European parliaments, Labour Party members, and members of affiliated unions…

Labour’s history has been one of long periods of opposition after losing power — 13 years after its defeat by Winston Churchill’s Conservatives in 1951, 18 years after losing to Margaret Thatcher in 1979. And Mr. Miliband faces the challenge of doing something Mr. Blair and Mr. Brown never achieved,uniting the party’s contending wings and ending what David Miliband’s campaign manager, Douglas Alexander, described as the party’s habit of forming “a circular firing squad” after losing elections...

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