Daily catch-up: Ed Miliband ‘not creepy’, and young people ‘not on social media too much’

Things you may have missed on the websphere over the past 24 hours

1. Ed Miliband picked up a celebrity endorsement from Boy George at the Attitude awards. General Boles has turned it into a billboard.

2. The Labour leader was also supported by Roy Hattersley in today’s Guardian. But I do not think that it would be sensationalist to say that the attacks on him from Frank Field and Nick Cohen were more interesting.

Field, the Labour MP for Birkenhead, agrees with Boris Johnson in wanting work restrictions on citizens of the 10 new EU member states until their incomes grow closer to the UK’s:

“Ed said at the meeting last night that he would not actually put forward a policy of trying to achieve restrictions from Europe if he didn’t think one could succeed. Politics is partly about showing that you can overcome the impossible. It is also important for our voters to feel you are trying on their behalf.”

Cohen wrote in The Spectator:

“If a bus driver were heading towards the edge of a cliff, the passengers would try to seize control of the wheel in all cases except one. Members of the Parliamentary Labour Party would sit back in their seats, put on their most confident smiles, and tell each other they were going full-speed ahead in the right direction.”

If it is balance you want, try Hopi Sen:

“In the last 30 years, only one opposition has improved their poll ratings between the final conference season of the political cycle and the subsequent general election. (That was the 2005 Tories, who endured a brief dip immediately after Labour’s 2004 conference and then returned to where they were that summer.)”

3. Eighty-nine per cent of 15-18 year olds have an active Facebook account, and 62 per cent are on Twitter. ComRes carried out a survey of their attitudes to social media for BBC Newsbeat.

Only 37 per cent say their “friends or family tell me I am online too much”; 56 per cent say they don’t. As so often, 7 per cent say they “don’t know”. What do they mean, they don’t know? Are they so glued to their devices that they have never noticed what their friends and families are saying to them?

4. Quotation of the Day. HL Mencken via Rob Ford:

“A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”

5. Thanks to Chris White (again) for another picture. This is a composition entitled, “Head and shoulders in the arable crops east of Vienna.”

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6. Finally, thanks to Zen Miles for this:

“I refused to believe my roadworker father was stealing from his job, but when I got home, all the signs were there.”