EXPOSING MILIBAND’S WEAKNESS

For Ed Miliband, the Labour Party’s leader in the UK, the last ten days or so have been wretched. Mr Miliband who has been so desperately unimpressive in the past few months, particularly in response to the spending review delivered by George Osborne, now finds himself at the centre of a scandal that exposes his weakness even further.

Mr Miliband would never have guessed that a Westminster barroom brawl involving Falkirk MP Eric Joyce would have had such seismic repercussions.

Mr Joyce decided to stand down and subsequently this has triggered a poisonous battle in who should become the next Labour candidate in this safe Labour seat. The issue is now threatening to engulf the Labour leader, who has never looked so weak, rattled and indecisive.

The first allegations to emerge were that the union Unite – whose block vote was crucial in winning Mr Miliband his job following the departure of Gordon Brown – had swamped the local party constituency with new and unfettered members, so they could vote for the union’s preferred Left-wing candidate.

Worse still, it was then discovered that Unite, led by Len McCluskey, was itself paying the new members’ subscription fees, and in some cases had even signed up people as members without their knowledge. This could lead to a potential criminal act of identity theft.

A strong leader of the Labour Party would have recognised the huge political danger in allowing a militant trade union (which wants Labour to wreck the economy all over again with more spending and more debt) to tighten its already vice-like grip on the party.

It is alleged that, for weeks, Mr Miliband knew about the Falkirk allegations and did nothing. It has taken the deeply suspicious resignation of his election chief Tom Watson, and the revelation that Unite had tried to influence the outcome in a further 40 selection contests elsewhere in the country, to wake him up from this pathetic dithering.

And yet Ed Miliband’s response has been feeble and inadequate.

On Friday, Mr Miliband made much of the fact that he has referred Labour’s internal report into Falkirk to the police. But, in reality, was this not an act of weakness given that 24 hours earlier the Conservative MP Henry Smith had written a public letter to the Chief Constable of Police Scotland calling for a full fraud inquiry?

Mr Miliband who champions the cause of openness and transparency is steadfast in his refusal to make the report public. A string of senior figures, however, has demanded that he do so.

Mr Miliband, who wants to shackle Britain’s free Press with statutory regulation, is a position that is at odds with the openness he calls for. For how would the murky dealings and vote-rigging within his party have surfaced if such a framework had existed? It is likely the shenanigans and underhand dealings of Unite would never have been exposed.

Calling on Mr McCluskey to turn his back on ‘machine politics’, the Labour Party has to answer as to why it has quietly changed the rules by making it a condition that any candidate in a council or Parliamentary election must be a union member (as opposed to should be, which was formerly the case). This was done shortly after Mr Miliband become leader.

Many people will question whether Mr Miliband is in any position to confront Unite and its leadership over its bid to drag Labour back to the bad old days of 1980s militancy. It is certain that if Unite withdrew its financial support of the Labour Party, the party would quickly become inoperable, if not by going bust. Over the past three years alone Unite has given Labour a staggering £8 million.

No wonder then that Labour are unable to commit properly to spending cuts, in fear that Mr McCluskey and his union cronies might not like it.