Labour's Leadership Contest a Damp Squib

The Labour Leadership contest is hardly inspiring. Five of the candidates (the Milibands, Balls, Burnham and Abbott) are Oxbridge educated. The three front-runners plus Burnham have only ever worked as policy advisors or political researchers (although Balls was a journalist at the FT) before entering Parliament. All four are apparachiks who - whatever they say now - never, at the time, uttered a syllable of dissent about the war in Iraq or New Labour's knee-bending adulation of the City. David Miliband seems to have spent a lot of his time as Foreign Secretary trying to make sure that the truth abour British complicity in out-sourced torture never came to light. Balls was Brown's consigliere for years. This is not so much Next Labour as "old" New Labour.