Daily catch-up: political tribalism, Ed Miliband’s vanity and the receding of the SNP tide

A miscellany of political musings and furies, plus the original ‘Stairway to Heaven’

1. Jake Goretzki’s latest cartoon was done before the election, but is just as apposite to the post-match analysis.

2. The best post-election article was Phil Collins's rage against Ed Miliband's vanity in The Times on Friday (pay wall). Here's an extract:

“The defeat debate is already a cacophony but a voice conspicuously absent from the concord is that of Ed Miliband. The former leader could do his party a service by making plain why he thinks Labour lost. It is not a perfunctory mea culpa we need. It is a recantation. Mr Miliband could say, in these exact words, ‘I thought the country had moved to the left. I was wrong.’ The trouble is I suspect he still thinks he is right. He thinks the electorate weren’t up to it. Add false consciousness to the historic litany of Labour excuses.

“Until Mr Miliband proves me wrong, it’s hard not to load both barrels and send bullets his way. Mr Miliband decided to address himself to the 2 per cent of the rich and the 8 per cent of the poor with nothing to say to the unsqueezed middle in between. Arrogantly, with conviction but no evidence, he tested his own stupid theories to his party’s destruction. Labour did not get murdered; it committed suicide. The tragedy was horribly familiar, this time in both senses of the word. The Labour party in 2015 became the victim of a ghastly atavistic dispute, the lab rat for Mr Miliband’s experiment in proving that his father, who insisted there was no parliamentary road to socialism, was right all along. The people Labour stands for need a Labour government and he left them with nothing. For vanity and for shame, Ed. So, am I angry about what he did? Hell, yes.”

3. The Scottish National Party tide will recede in time: the question is whether it will be before or after a second referendum. My column for The Independent on Sunday.

4. Chuka Umunna's withdrawal from the Labour leadership election raised the question of whether there is something wrong with our politics. Why don't people want to put themselves forward, and why do voters feel shut out? I looked at some of the problems and some of the possible solutions.

5. The Top 10 in The New Review, the Independent on Sunday magazine, was Different Songs With the Same Title.

6. And finally thanks to Moose Allain for this:

“Anyone know where Kevin Bacon's left his car keys? Asking for a friend of a friend of a friend of friend of a friend.”