Blog Posts by Ian Dunt

The best way to keep something secret is to do it in plain sight. Right in front of our faces, an organisation more powerful than any European state is being built and no-one is talking about it. Its function is to turn European democracies into free market test beds. It will be online in July.

David Cameron's return from Brussels last week saw the media focus on his phantom veto and the mood of his backbenchers. The precise room in which the British prime minister chooses to be powerless was the subject of intense interest. But despite the avalanche of coverage of the eurozone crisis and the frantic political efforts to correct it, little mention was given to the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

This innocuous sounding organisation was put firmly in place last Monday with the timetable for its creation being shortened from the end of the year to mid-summer. The lack of coverage it has received is inversely proportional to the threat it poses to European democracy and left-wing

Reading David Miliband's Statesman article is a dreary, depressing way to start your day. Like the perfume of an old girlfriend you never liked very much, it takes you straight back to the New Labour years, with potential leadership rivals firing off vague missives and the press dutifully trying to decode them.

On the face of it, David's article is a response to a Roy Hattersley piece which, near as I can tell, was published five months ago. Quite why it would be published now is anyone's guess. He does the current Labour leader the service of mentioning him, unlike his Gordon Brown intervention, where the only real criticism of government policy was the calculated absence of the prime minister's name.

Politically, it is monumentally uninteresting, parroting the Blairite formula of "notions of merit, reward and responsibility" and a politics which "mobilises people, whether as patients or parents or employees or citizens, to make choices". Its tedium is in direct contrast to the

David Cameron has assumed the role of leader of the opposition in addition to his duties as prime minister. PMQs now consists of him slapping himself in the face with his own baffling policies and then quickly gathering his wits to defend them. It's like a one-man theatre performance in the Benny Hill tradition, and by that I mean: unseemly, unfunny and harking back to a dark period of British history.

Some people are already chalking this up as an Ed Miliband win, itself a grotesque perversion of the concept of 'win'. In reality, Ed mumbled some lines about economic growth and the NHS bill and then Dave stood up and beat himself to death with them.

When Labour left office growth was around two per cent. Today it is contracting at a rate of 0.2%. Ed's attempt to highlight this small fact came down to a set of pre-scripted questions, which Dave rightly pointed out bore no relation to his answers. He didn't even manage to concisely link the downturn to the austerity programme for the

In most respects Ed Miliband is unlucky. He does not photograph well, he has an odd, occasionally unconvincing manner, he leads a divided and rebellious party and faces an almost uniformly hostile media. His only real assets are his ideas. When he has the stomach to stick to them, they are popular and uncannily in tune with the murky political reality of austerity Britain.

On phone-hacking he expressed moral and political bravery by coming out against Murdoch before it was the safe thing to do. His conference speech was damned as 'left-wing', but within months David Cameron was echoing its rhetoric.

It is a shame, then, that he fumbles the ball on the big one. The policy shift Labour implemented since the new year — vigorously attacked by union leaders and party backbenchers this morning — eliminates his advantage by forsaking his ability to express distinct ideas from the government. It reduces opposition to management style

On the surface, it appears sensible. After all, acceptance

Journalists are doing the government's job for it, so much so that David Cameron's last TV interview saw him defending Ed Miliband's performance. The range of attack dogs growling against Miliband is simply astonishing. This morning the Labour leader tried to relaunch his agenda in time for 2012. There was little there to significantly change the course of events.

He appeared on the Today programme, where John Humphrys relentlessly told him to apologise for Labour's economic record in office before insinuating he was too ugly to connect with the public. Online, political commentators were as crude as possible, attacking his tone and his language as if sizing up a blind date.

By the time journalists had gathered for his speech, they began attacking the lack of bacon sandwiches. The Labour leader was late, sparking a wave of increasingly vitriolic attacks on him. "Never seen a speech go down so badly before it's even been given," one online commentator remarked.

It all highlights the

Is it just me, or is everyone putting it on now? The Twitter outrage came from the right today. It's been a while. Usually it's the left. Perhaps they felt left out. Dianne Abbott said "white people love playing 'divide and rule'" on the social media site last night and by this morning it was Lady Chatterley's Lover all over again, with added false equivalence and heavy-handed moralising.

I'm not the right person to have opinions on this stuff. I simply couldn't care less. I don't care when clothing companies make T-shirts that supposedly objectify women. I don't care if people make generalisations about my race or other people's race. I don't care when a female character in a TV series says all men are afraid of commitment. I don't care when Jeremy Clarkson says something repugnant. That's your special ticket right there, your free pass out of an early coronary. Just don't care until someone says something they really mean. Get the balance right between serious thought and incitement