Eds inbox: January 24th

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

If Ed Miliband could only read five blogposts each day, he’d read these ones…

Why violence plays into the hands of the Government – Left Futures
By Owen Jones

Let me conjure up a fictitious, but entirely plausible, character for you. Mary Wilson is a 45-year-old council worker who lives in Newcastle. She’s received notice from Northumberland County Council that there is a good chance she will lose her job. Despite media chatter about ‘gold-plated pensions’, she currently has a £1,500 pension to look forward to, and even that is under attack.

Mary has two children: a 19-year-old son who, like one in five young people in Britain today, is out of work; and a 16-year-old daughter who is terrified about amassing a monumental pile of debt if she goes to university. To top it all off, Mary fears that services that both she and her family depend on will soon vanish. – Read more

Why is sexism more acceptable than racism? – Sarah Hayward
By Sarah Hayward

The major sport story this morning is the neanderthal comments made by Sky sport journos Richard Keys and Andy Gray.

It goes like this: a woman has the temerity to decide to enter the realms of officiating professional football. Said woman is clearly quite good at what she does compared to her peers* because on Saturday she was selected to be one of the linos at Molineaux for the Wolves v Liverpool game.

Thinking their mics were off Keys and Gray, prior to the game even starting, questioned said lino’s knowledge of the rules. Specifically the offside rule. For those already bored by this post due to it’s football nature, it’s a neanderthal understanding of women supporters or otherwise involved in football, that our tiny little brains are too small to get our heads round what is in actual fact a fairly straight forward rule. – Read more

On Coulson… – Hopi Sen
By Hopi Sen

I don’t have a lot of experience of the top end of press officering. From my reading of diaries and articles, the very top bit appears to involve taking editors to lunch so you can phone up their subordinates the next day and have them quivering with fear, or sucking up to star columnists so they endorse the latest two word philosophy dreamed up by your policy unit. My experience was rather more base. Standing in bushes, holding umbrellas, helping people spell Ynys Mon. That sort of thing.

So I don’t really know what any single Director of Communications at Number Ten does all day, or how you can tell from the outside whether they’re doing it brilliantly well or appallingly badly. There are too many other variables, like the willingness of the PM to address problems you might identify, or the ability to direct events being limited by internal warfare, whether it’s yellow on blue crossfire, or red on red faction fighting. – Read more

Alan should return, but Ed will excell – Labour Uncut
By John Woodcock

Much of what has been written about Alan Johnson since Thursday has read like the obituary of a man who has stepped off the political stage for good.

That need not be the case; I hope he will want to return to the front line before too long.

Commentary pondering whether Alan’s relaxed temperament made his exit inevitable is as poorly-founded as the assertion that a man who excelled as a minister for a decade could be fairly labelled gaffe-prone after a single slip. – Read more

The Nutty Professor – LabourList
By Jim Sweetman

The Gove curriculum is simply laughable

Michael Gove has been keen to tell everybody for the past nine months that he does not wish to intervene in education and that he wants schools and teachers to be autonomous. He doesn’t want local interference or any smarty-pants from government telling headteachers how to run their schools. However, it turns out that he does want to intervene – and radically – in prescribing what they teach. An ordinary sort of person might assume that this was the major area of their business and, therefore, one in which they really ought to be autonomous but not Michael Gove. He has also set up an independent review panel and then spent most of the week telling its members what they should say. – Read more

Our suggestions for Ed’s inbox are limited by what we read – so if you’ve seen a blogpost that should be in Ed’s inbox, let us know.