Labour leader Ed Miliband has gone to further lengths to prove how out of touch he is with the British voting public – this time by declaring that he doesn’t read much British news.
In a bizarre statement reported by Buzzfeed UK, Mr Miliband claimed: “I don’t read much British news. You get a lot of advice in the newspapers about what you should do. It’s much more important to follow your own path and stick to your own path. I’ve made that a rule in the last three and a half years.”
He’s trying to sound like a leader, but Miliband is putting more distance between himself and ordinary Britons, 82 percent of which claim to read a newspaper.
Instead, Mr Miliband said he favourite news website was RealClearPolitics, a Chicago-based U.S. news aggregator which is 51 percent owned by Forbes, whose owner and CEO is Steve Forbes.
Forbes, a former Republican Party Presidential candidate, is said to support smaller government and the death penalty. He, like UKIP leader Nigel Farage, opposes gun control and environmental regulation. Wikipedia notes that he opposes as well as drug legalisation and same-sex marriage.
An interesting choice for Miliband then, though it should be said that RealClearPolitics does not adopt a partisan position in its aggregation. It is also not a very popular website in Britain, with Alexa.com ranking it as the 15,681st most popular website in the UK.
By contrast, the Guardian is the 14th highest rated, the Guido Fawkes political blog is 829th, the Spectator 1083rd, and Breitbart.com is 1138th. Party-affiliated site LabourList is ranked around 20,000, while ConservativeHome is around 5000th.
All in all a pretty strange comment for the leader of a major political party to make. He’s either admitting to be drastically out of touch with what is going on in Britain… or he knows something the rest of us don’t. I’m willing to hazard a guess it is not the latter.
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