Tricky things, metaphors. Get them wrong and they can straitjacket you into a spider's web of semantic poison ivy. For Ed Miliband this is a time of trajectory-setting and vision-clarification, a moment when an expertly employed metaphor can go a long way. Unfortunately for Miliband, the choicest image to emerge from yesterday's interview with the Guardian was from The Blind Side, an American football coaching manual written by Michael Lewis, which was cited as his favourite book. Miliband believes it tells us something vital about capitalism. But what exactly?
The title of The Blind Side is a reference to the most undervalued position in an American football team, the hard-working left-tackler who protects fancy-dan, overpaid quarter backs, most of whom have a right-handed blind spot that this dogged artisan polices. So, the blind side might be a metaphor for the failure of the market to calibrate real value accurately (as Miliband was trying to suggest). It might also express the basic po-faced silliness of American football itself. And it is definitely a rather overblown film starring Sandra Bullock for which, perhaps surprisingly, she won an Oscar last year.
Sadly for Miliband, while his choice of metaphor may indeed glitter with hidden meaning, it is unlikely to speak to the British public, who would probably have preferred it if he'd accused unfenced capitalism of making everybody sick as a parrot and waved about a copy of Fever Pitch. It does, however, give a glimpse into the private world of the Labour leader, flagging up a suspected membership of that small group of fortysomething men who developed a love of US Gridiron in the 80s when it was televised on prime-time Channel 4. These were mainly boys who seemed uncomfortable with the boisterousness of football, drawn instead to American Football's stat-nerd appeal and arcane technology. From where, we might imagine, it is only a short hop to galvanising teenage interest in the hard economics of endogenous growth theory.
