Spinning banned – official

Spinning has been banned. Official. At the inaugural meeting of Ed Miliband’s new shadow cabinet the law was laid down.

“I will not be briefing against colleagues”, he said, “and I do not expect colleagues to be briefing against others or myself”.

Factions are also out. Apparently. “We will have no return to the factionalism of the past”, he decreed. Though how this latter is to be policed is less clear. Images of Rosie Winterton pouncing on unsuspecting colleagues spring to mind:

“You there, by the bar. Move along. Two’s company. Three is a faction”.

No factions. No briefing. Let’s see how Westminster’s plotters respond to this edict in tomorrow’s papers.


Tags: , , ,


3 Responses to “Spinning banned – official”

  1. Lobbydog says:

    If Miliband is going to challenge ministers who brief against each other, good for him. But not everyone in his shadow cabinet will like it.

    None the less, that is a different thing to the “spinning” which gave the previous Labour government such a bad name. “Spinning” is when a situation or policy is presented in a certain way that is incongruent with the complete truth, in a bid to make political gain. An example on a grand scale was the “45 minute claim” in the build up to the Iraq War. But it permeated down the ministerial chain – see this, http://bit.ly/d2rC3M , for a more recent example.

    Stopping this kind of thing isn’t beyond Miliband, but it’ll take a good few years for the party to shake off it’s past.

  2. Skiamakhos says:

    But we need to foster an atmosphere within the party, free from acrimony or personal vendettas, but where people can play Devil’s Advocate or stand up and say, when they see something bad going on “Hold on, that’s not going to work” or “That’s going to lose us votes” or “Crikey, there’ll be riots in the streets if that one goes through!” Give us freedom to call things as we see them, or we risk going back to Nu Labour’s old ways where nobody ever stood up against what we now admit publicly were huge mistakes. Let’s stop the mistakes being made, before they become law.

  3. AnneJGP says:

    Excellent news.

Leave a Reply