http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/ and others are enjoying a political non-spat between Ed Miliband (of the new/old Labour) and David Cameron (current Prime Minister). Typical is: Political exchanges don’t come much more important than this – Ed Miliband has picked a fight with David Cameron over cheap chocolate.
In an interview for Parliament’s magazine The House, Miliband has taken umbrage with a pre-election complaint made by Cameron in 2006 about the problem of cut price chocolate orange bars taking the place of real fruit in WH Smith’s, to the detriment of the nation’s health. It was used as an example of irresponsible capitalism as Britain faced an obesity crisis.
“Look, if he can’t sort out the chocolate orange, he’s not going to be sort out the train companies, the energy companies, the banks, is he?” Miliband said in the interview.
He has a point – I would love (not) to have a Prime Minister who delays encouraging the EU to sort out the Euro worries without destroying the world economy to pick off a personal irritant. Wouldn’t we all like to zap the people who annoy us? Or as Alex Massie puts it: Let me suggest that a man who thinks this – will not consider any aspect of your lives beyond the proper interfering purview of government.
It’s rather like in the old days when I was working in Zambia. You needed Bank of Uganda permission to export dead animal parts derived from hunting. One document I liked to see was the Certificate of Non Endangered Species. Of course no one told the poor (now deceased) rhinoceros of that!