Martin Bright

It seems that everyone is offering Ed Miliband advice. Jonathan Freedland wrote him an alternative leader’s speech. Matthew D’Ancona urged Miliband to answer his own fundamental question: “What is the point of a Left-of-centre Labour leader with an empty wallet?” And Owen Jones urges the Labour leader to find a vision. It would be understandable if Ed Miliband was beginning to get more than a tad exasperated with all this advice. His party is united, he is ahead in the polls and his opponents are in disarray. He has already survived longer than many sage heads believed he could and is now the man most likely to be the next prime minister.

What is this mania for simplification? Listening to Nigel Farage struggling to explain UKIP tax policy on the Today programme this week made me wonder why, in so many areas of policy, politicians of the right have such a fetish for making things less complicated than they really are. UKIP’s message is the very essence of this tendency and in Farage’s case you have to wonder whether he’s just too dim to entertain a complex idea. It is no surprise that UKIP’s comfortingly simple message is gaining support, but we should be wary of political oversimplification in times of crisis. This tendency is not restricted to UKIP. The government is learning that simplification of systems can sometimes be very problematic indeed.

The simplest way to react to the madder pronouncements of the trade union movement is to dismiss it as so much infantile 'group think'. Solidarity can be very selective and Israeli trade unionists are apparently discounted simply for being Israeli. The latest decision of the TUC to send a delegation to Gaza under the auspices of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign is not the daftest. But the idea that it would give delegates anything approaching balance is absurd. My Bright on Politics column for the Jewish Chronicle this week was addressed to the Jewish community but the Israel/Palestine conflict has a wider resonance: 'Supporters of Israel are losing the battle of ideas in the UK. This has probably been true for some time, if only they would admit it.

The genius of Mo Farah was only underscored by the plodding stupidity of Downing Street's statements about the "All Must Have Prizes" culture this weekend. If this is the culture which produced Mo Farah then surely we should be celebrating it. But the truth is that it doesn't exist and never has done. How does David Cameron think we managed to get 28 gold medals if not through the promotion of competitive sport in schools? Mo Farah attended an inner city comprehensive his talent was spotted and encouraged. What's wrong with that? Considering the scale of the success of London 2012, it's no surprise that there have been attempts from both ends of the political spectrum to claim this Olympics for their side. It is a rather pointless game to play.

This is not a great time to be a tabloid journalist. It is an even worse time to be an out-of-work tabloid journalist. Few tears are shed when red-top hacks lose their jobs and they are consigned to a discard pile that includes unemployed bankers and politicians. This is why the case of Matt Nixson is so unusual. When the phone hacking scandal broke, Nixson had just moved from the News of the World, where he was features editor, to take the same job on the Sun. He was given the push last July amid a flurry of allegations about alleged payments to police and prison officers (Nixson was alleged to have authorised a £750 payment to a prison officer for a story about the Soham murderer Ian Huntley, although he wasn’t told this until five months later).

Last night I attended a public meeting to discuss the successful bid by parents in north London to set up a free school in East Finchley. The Archer Academy is to be a non-selective, non-denominational community school. It was an extraordinary occasion, with hundreds of local parents prepared to throw their weight behind the project. Tellingly, a local Labour councillor was on the panel to answer questions about the new school which has cross-party support. This is due, in no small part, to the desperation of the community in the face of consistent refusal on the part of the local authority (Tory-controlled Barnet) to do the right thing and build a new school.

I have just started a new column, Bright on Politics, for the Jewish Chronicle. My first piece last week discussed Ed Balls and Israel. And this week I discussed why politicians turn to judges when they have lost their moral compass. Here's the piece. I'm sure you'll let me know what you think. Blind faith of Brothers and others in law When the political class loses faith in its ability to make moral judgments, what does it do? It calls in the lawyers. The present fashion for judge-led inquiries in the UK has given us the Leveson inquiry into the ethics of the press, and may yet lead to a similar examination of the ethics of banking. On the moral issue of settlements in the Occupied Territories, Israel and the Trades Union Congress could not be further apart.

The discussion of Britain’s latest tennis nearly man has turned inevitably to the culture of a sport which, in this country at least, remains laughably exclusive. Asked on the Today programme why we fail to produce consistent numbers of good tennis players the tennis evangelist and comedian Tony Hawks (who knows a thing or two about what is laughable) made a good suggestion about opening up our ridiculously expensive (and often empty) courts to the public. But the debate about tennis reveals a deeper malaise. In this country we are prepared to accept mediocrity because the last thing we would dare tamper with is the class system. There is a difference between elitism and exclusivity.

The cutting of 17 army units by 2020 was never going to be popular. It is over-dramatic to suggest we now have a self-defence force rather than an army, but the loss of 20,000 regular soldiers will clearly have an effect on the UK’s ability to wage war. And yet the cutting is the easy part. The test for the government (or the next) is how they tackle the consequences. One of these will be large-scale redundancies among ex-soldiers and support staff. Has anyone thought about this? We already know that unemployment and mental health problems are an issue among veterans and that many end up in prison. This is a disgrace.

Hardly a day goes by without more bad news on youth unemployment. The latest figures on NEETs (a horrible de-humanising term for school leavers who are not in education, employment or training) show that the numbers rose between 2010 and 2011 to over eight per cent. The release of these statistics coincided with new polling which showed a near-complete collapse of support for the government among young people. Does this government hate young people? Probably not. Does it belatedly realise it has a massive problem with youth unemployment? Yes it does. The Youth Contract was introduced by Nick Clegg because he and those around him recognised that the Work Programme was not designed to tackle this problem.

I was very interested to see the launch of the Who Funds You? website today. This is an intriguing new initiative to examine the transparency of think tanks. The tendency over recent years to outsource political policy to these micro-institutions makes it ever more important for the public to know the sources of their funding.   In keeping with the spirit of the exercise, the website’s founders are entirely transparent about the sources of its funding (it has none). And in the same spirit, I should disclose that one of the people involved is a friend of mine, Paul Evans, the founder of Political Innovation and editor of Local Democracy blog.