How come David Miliband has a better grasp of our problems than Nick's mates?

Thanks to Paul Walter (@paulwalteruk) for posting David Miliband's speech in The House in favour of Lord's Reform. It's a corker and well worth a read. I suspect there will be a few members of the Labour Party reading it with their heads in their hands, wondering if they picked the right brother.

However, when you read it, you'll notice that he spends some little time at the start giving Nick a right old kicking. As per my post yesterday, It would seem the elder Miliband understands well that our unpopularity has little to do with our association with the Tories (as the papers were quoting friends of Nick saying this weekend), and rather more to do with our own actions.

To quote him in The House:

'When the right hon. Gentleman said before the election that he wanted to unite the nation, he could scarcely have imagined that people of all shades of opinion would come together so quickly to agree that he is not a very lovable rogue.'

Ouch.

Now this isn't a 'let's kick Nick' post (nor a 'let's kick Nick out' post). It's a plea to stop pretending that it's the Tories fault that we're so unpopular (although the farcical 'not a cigarette paper between us' approach to coalition government certainly didn't help) and face up to the fact that it's our mess and our responsibility - and start enacting a plan of attack to put things right.


Addendum

Great piece here about how we might start putting things right...