Crowding the centre ground – our ‘identikit leaders’

I don’t often read the Daily Mail – it’s a bit too strong for me now – but the feature today by historian Dominic Sandbrook on our ‘identikit leaders’ perfectly explains why I’ve lost faith in party politics.

Listening to David Miliband’s speech at the Labour Party conference he asks,

“What would self-made men such as Ernest Bevin and Jim Callaghan, who hauled themselves up by their bootstraps from poverty, think of a leadership election that asked members to choose between two privileged, Oxford-educated brothers from North London?

“What would war heroes such as Major Clement Attlee and Major Denis Healey make of an election in which neither of the leading candidates had ever held a job outside the political arena?

“And what, they might well ask, does it say about the sad state of British politics that our three major parties are led by smooth fortysomethings who might have been cast from exactly the same mould?

Read on … www.dailymail.co.uk