If this was The West Wing you might say that Ed Miliband has the Mo. Well maybe just the M, or perhaps half an M. Whatever you want to call it Ed is beginning to look a little more at home as leader, and the public are responding.
His slow and thoughtful approach to politics, which for the first year of his leadership was deemed a potentially fatal hindrance, now compares favourably to the lightweight Cameron. This bears out in the polls where, not only have Labour held a fairly consistent lead in the last few months, Miliband has overtaken Cameron in terms of popularity.
There is no doubt he has been helped by a Coalition seemingly intent on destroying itself – but he should be given some credit for this too. Better strategy has meant, bar a few shrill moments, he has been more decisive and effective in attack – not allowing Cameron to wriggle out of trouble as he so often did before.
Credit too should go to his frontbench team, particularly the power-duo that is Balls and Cooper. Balls cut Osborne’s austerity budget to shreds and made one of the Tory’s biggest assets look weak, out-of-touch and out of ideas. His unswerving message of growth and gentler passage out of deficit means Labour have earned the right to be listened to again. Cooper meanwhile has done the political equivalent of taking May out back and giving her a shoeing. Law and order was once a banker for Conservative ministers – not any more.
Six months ago the resignation of a shadow cabinet minister would have led to abject panic. Today we saw a confident Ed Miliband make a couple of minor tweaks plus the very smart promotion of John Cruddas – a guy liked and respected across the party, whether left or right, Blair or Brown. That he didn’t feel the need to replace Hain with another ‘big-beast’ shows just how far he has come.
There are still lots of challenges ahead – Labour fell just short of the magic 40% in the May elections. turnout was also worryingly though, ,waning that whilst the public don’t like Cameron and Co. they are yet to be convinced by Ed and his team. As Ed himself noted at the recent Progress conference, he and the rest of the party now have a job of work to do to engage all those registered voters who decided to stay at home. He also needs to start articulating a vision of a future Labour government in policy terms. The country is inclined to listen, so now is the time to start the conversation.
That said, it has been a long-time since Labour were in such a promising position and, like it not, it is Ed Miliband who has put us there. Slowly but surely he is coming good.
Labour have an important battle on their hands. Their opposition to Andrew Lansley’s terrible Health and Social Care Bill (and it is terrible, more of that later) is as much out of a need to defend their very being as it is for any ideological reasons.
The previous Labour government were wrong on the economy. This is now fact. It is irrelevant that Brown and Darling led the way in ensuring a global response to the crisis, stopping a complete meltdown in the financial sector; nor does anyone care that the Tories would have done nothing differently in the lead up to the crisis; the fact that Labour are proving to be right about the desperate need for a plan for growth to go alongside Osborne’s austerity drive is an irrelevance. History is written by the winners and Labour now have a long battle ahead to regain trust from the electorate. Important as the economy is however, nothing stirs a Labour person like the NHS – we created it and we love it as you would love a child. Lose the battle here and there seems little point getting out of bed in the morning.
So to the bill – and it is a shocker. The flagship policy is the creation of GP-led commissioning. Out go Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities. In comes a single national health board and hundreds of small GP commissioning consortiums – reducing bureaucracy and making healthcare more responsive to local needs. It is doomed to failure.
GPs have zero track record in commissioning, they do however have a very good track record in clinical care. They also have full to bursting appointment books. Why, when the average consultation is already only just over 10 minutes in length, do we want them to spend less time seeing patients? The reality is they will delegate the commissioning powers to someone else. Who, I hear you ask? The very same people who have just been made redundant from the defunct primary care trusts.
Any suggestion of a cut in bureaucracy is a fallacy, the new structure has just as many levels as the old one, the simple fact is this is a major restructure that will cost billions of pounds and even in the long-term the exercise will cost money rather than save it. That the new system may be more responsive to local needs could well be a fair one, though whether this will come back to haunt the coalition is another matter – people crave consistency and a perception of equality. How long until the phrase ‘postcode lottery’ comes back into fashion and we start to see a re-centralisation of services?
The rest of the bill includes increasing how much private work a trust can carry out and laying out a timetable for all hospital trusts to gain foundation status. The former is there to increase potential revenues (though risks further impacting on waiting times for those who can’t pay), the latter will, in theory, help increase competition and therefore standards. (But also runs the risk of hospital trusts effectively being bankrupted, with all the associated political fallout).
Labour’s response needs to be robust, the NHS is in pretty good shape and they they have much to be proud of from their time in office – increasing spending to be in line with the European average, then using the money to decimate waiting lists, improve survival rates for those suffering from cancer, heart attacks and strokes and created a fairer pay and reward system, allowing the best health professionals to stay treating patients. The much maligned targets helped to ensure all this happened – as soon as the coalition sidelined them waiting times started to increase again.
What Labour didn’t manage to do is carry staff with them. Staff morale is arguably at its lowest ever, and is still falling. This impacts both on clinical care and the public’s perception of the NHS. Secondly, they didn’t make any in-roads into customer service – which, in my experience has tended to be appalling. It sounds a small issue, but most people’s first contact with the NHS is with a non-clinician and, if the quality is poor so is people’s first impression of the whole organisation. Any changes in the above will come, not from legislation, but from a change in culture and leadership. This is what Labour should be calling for.
Ed M and his team have had a good couple of weeks after a pretty disastrous start to the year, but this is yet another big test. Labour cannot afford for their record on the NHS to go the way of their reputation on the economy.
More bleak news for Ed Milibamd this morning as The Guardian splashes with a report from Shadow Minister and ‘leading Labour thinker’ Gregg McClymont stating Labour are at risk of falling into a Tory trap and losing the next election. The story itself is pretty lightweight, but the implication that Miliband Junior is following a core votes strategy is damaging, as is the fact the paper has now led with two anti-Miliband stories in three days. Once is careless, twice might be seen as some sort of conspiracy.
The tragic thing is, if you get the chance to listen to a set-piece speech from Ed you’ll soon realise that a core-votes strategy is the last-thing on his mind. He has a clear vision of what the post-banking crisis should look like. The need for a new approach to the economy and society, a more responsible capitalism. This isn’t just about bashing bankers, it is an opportunity to put fairness back at the heart of what we do. His problem? No-one is listening.
Eddites will tell you it is virtually impossible to get the public to listen so soon after defeat at the polls. I don’t buy it. The coalition is not the landslides of 79 or 97 and the public remain unconvinced of Cameron (though considering the year he has had, he should get some credit for the current polls). The public are looking about for an alternative, the trouble is they are not seeing anything they can buy into.
Appointing Tom Baldwin as Comms Director earlier this year certainly tightened up the messaging, helping to make the outfit more tactically adept and scoring a couple of small wins in the process. What he has been unable to do is develop a narrative. For this you need an underlying strategy, and if Ed and his team have one it seems to be very underlying indeed.
So, we enter 2012, with the polls in the same place as a year ago and the public still unaware of who Ed is and what he stands for (desperate Daily Mirror pieces aside), except now we are a year on, the party is getting restless and even the most benign of centre-left papers is beginning to turn against him. The next few months are a huge test for Ed and, in particular Tim Livesey, his new Chief of Staff. Can they develop a winning narrative that resonates with the public, and if so how quickly? The question is – is it already too late?
Attacking Ed has become the ‘normal’ thing to do. First the right of the party attack him for lacking direction and, well let’s be honest, not being David enough. Then it is the turn of the left, admonishing him for taking the only sensible political option and opposing the strikes, encouraging instead more negotiation and concessions from both sides. Each day as I flick though Labourlist, Labour Uncut or The Guardian the very people who should be helping shape the future direction of the party are instead wasting their time writing petty, self-indulgent pieces putting down our leader whilst offering no viable alternative.
I understand how tempting it is, indeed it is something I took part in when Gordon Brown was in charge, but then look where that got us. At best the public ignore it, making us irrelevant. At worst they find it an absolute turn-off.
I voted for Ed, though I know a lot of you didn’t. I didn’t vote for him because I thought he was a ready made PM in waiting, but because he had a vision. He spoke of a new kind of politics, he engaged thousands of young volunteers into his campaign, some of who had never been involved in any kind of politics before, and he felt like a genuine break from the past. In return for that promise I understood it might take a while for him to get really motoring. For me he is the right leader at the right time, someone to grow into the role as the party grows again out of the ashes of the New Labour era.
For this to work however he needs the best in his party lined-up behind him, not taking pot-shots from the sidelines. I want to see the great and the good going up against each other on schools, health, defence – pushing the party to go further and deliver more radical policy alternatives than ever before. Whilst we are it, let’s start really hammering the coalition. Whilst we are bitching at one another they are systematically destroying everything we hold dear, and we are letting them.
Over the last few weeks we have started to hear more about the kind of party Ed Miliband wants to lead. ‘The Squeezed Middle’ and ‘Promise of a Generation’ are beginnings of a narrative that I hope will end up in detailed policy that will resonate on the doorstep and deliver a genuine alternative to this cruel and unforgiving government.
In the meantime I would love to read more about policy and less about Ed’s leadership – let’s get behind him, campaign as one against the coalition and build a party ready to take power again.
Anyone expecting an electric start to Ed Miliband’s leadership will have been sorely disappointed. He played down the idea of this being the most important speech of his career and instead delivered a safe, solid performance. That is not to say there were no talking points, far from it, as I’ll discuss in a moment. Just that we are going to have to wait a little longer for the detail of whist his leadership means.
The word cloud above tells the real story of his speech – ‘change’ and ‘new generation’ are the stand out phrases… It is clear he thinks that he can steal the mantle of change from the coalition and turn it into a tangible vote winner for Labour. Sceptics suggest the government is just too new for any change message to be effective but I am not so sure. Ed Miliband has been hugely popular among young voters (as any photo of his massive volunteer led campaign team will attest to) who buy into a vision that politics needs a fundamental shift if it is to remain relevant in the 21st century. There are plenty of unhappy Lib-Dems too who feel their party has not quite matched actions to the rhetoric when it comes to changing the way politics does business – genuine change will be music to their disaffected ears.
Speaking of disaffected Lib-Dems, this speech had plenty to woo them back to their rightful home within the Labour party. Ed showed real humility when admitting that the party was wrong to be relaxed about people getting filthy rich. Relative wealth is just as an important indicator of a fair society as absolute wealth. He also showed no mercy when it came to Iraq. Rather than skirt round it, he squared up to it, denounced the decision to go to war as wrong and moved on. Most of the conference floor breathed a sigh of relief and applauded, the absence of applause from most of the former cabinet (Harriet Harman excepted bless her) will only help cement the fact the party has moved on.
By the end of the speech he had clearly won most of conference around, if not yet the country or commentariat. For me though it cemented my views and confirmed once and for all I voted for the right person. Ed’s campaign was all about hope and change for the future – an opportunity to redefine the centre-ground of politics, to set the agenda rather than just follow it. His speech today, although not perfect, suggests he will not shirk from this ambition as leader.
Political commentators are liberal with the term ‘the speech of his life’ but on this occasion they might just be right. Ed Miliband takes to the stage for the first time (well second actually – but first proper) this afternoon. This is his big opportunity to define himself beyond the party and to start re-shaping his caricature away from ‘Red-Ed’ and ‘Union-Puppet’. So, what might we expect?
1) David – He has to mention his brother, and I would have thought fairly early in his speech. To not is just to invite a press-storm. Chances are he will talk about both within the context of his family, and within the context of the leadership race. By the time the speech is repackaged for the news expect only to hear of David.
2) Unity – This has already been his watchword over the weekend and expect more of it this afternoon. History suggests the electorate are unforgiving of divided parties and he knows he only has a limited time to bring members and parliamentarians on-board.
3) Responsible Opposition – As a prelude to some difficult conversations within the party he will talk about the need to be a responsible opposition. Opposing where he thinks the coalition are wrong, but supportive and constructive where they agree.
4) The Unions – difficult one for him, but similar to the issue of David, to mention them is almost to invite more comment than he does. I think he plump for talking about Labour being the home of working men and women and responsible/moderate Union leaders being a force for good. I suspect Bob Crow will not get a look in :)
5) Change – a new generation. This is the key bit, and his ability to deliver a change narrative throughout the speech is central to its and his overall success. I suspect he will draw on his experience as Environment secretary – an issue he knows is popular amongst younger and lib-dem voters and use this. Either way – if he nails this message he is in with a shout.
So they are my predictions for later – reviews on both how accurate I have been and how good Ed has been will be posted later.
Peter Mandleson’s comments this morning is just one example of some increasingly negative campaigning by a number of the leadership contenders campaign teams. After 2 months of generally positive relations with only a few weeks to go and the pressure increasing, suddenly it is fair game to go on the attack. But playing this game is both short-sighted and ultimately futile. Does any one of them really want to inherit a divided party, of which great swathes hold you personally responsible for the failure of their preferred candidate? All the potential leaders need to take a deep breath, reel in their supporters and continue to deliver a positive, issue-based campaign.
And this is exactly what Ed Miliband has been doing. Whilst Peter Mandleson tours the TV studios in Millbank talking in ever more desperate soundbites, Ed is touring the country, listening to real people and realising the New Labour brand is dead.
That New Labour did some great things is undeniable. The Minimum Wage, Equality Legislation and huge investment in the NHS and Education are things we should rightly be proud of, but only a fool would deny it’s limitations. It’s control freakery, it’s disregard for civil liberties, it’s love affair with the super-wealthy (and the policies born of that love affair) caused disillusionment in communities up and down the country. New Labour has had it’s time – we should offer it our thanks and move on.
And this is what Ed is doing. On education, for example, he recognises that whilst people supported expanding the number of University places, tuition fees were unfair and created a barrier-to-entry for those from poorer backgrounds. The result? A pledge to abolish fees and create a graduate tax. For me though the key to his campaign is fairness. As I said earlier the creation of the National Minimum Wage was a great achievement, but Labour didn’t get the credit they deserved for it. Why? Because offering a few extra pounds an hour to the poorest in society whilst doing nothing to reign-in the salaries of the richest can never be deemed fair. Put simply, how can it be right that a CEO can earn up to 200 times the salary of the person who cleans his office? By campaigning for a living-wage and looking into the creation of a high-pay commission for both the public and private sectors. Ed shows both an understanding of the issues and a willingness to tackle them that moves him far beyond the limitations of New Labour.
So, Lord Mandleson can deliver as many warnings as he likes, but he and his nostalgic pals fundamentally miss the point. Ed’s campaign is not about taking the party back to a pre-New Labour era, he can’t for he has already moved beyond it.
I promise not to just copy and paste whole lumps of prose too often, but this is an exception. Ed’s fabian essay (and the video intro) delivers a brilliant summation of the crossroads we find ourselves in as a party. More importantly it offers a radical view of how we re-engage with the electorate. For me this has been the strongest, most genuine and engaging manifestos from any of the candidates to date. Have a read and judge for yourselves.
Without values we become managers and technocrats. It is a Labour ideology that makes us who we are. That is why I have put values at the centre of my campaign: a belief in equality, social justice, fairness at work, internationalism. But
the challenge is how to apply that ideology to our time—and how to win power.
Tony Blair said in his first Conference speech in 1994 “If the world changes, and we don’t, then we become of no use to the world. Our principles cease being principles and just ossify into dogma.” Tony was right then and the lesson applies today. We should always stand up for our ideology and values but always be willing to recognise the way the world has changed.
In the early 1990s some Labour people thought of themselves as traditionalists defending the Labour cause against Tony Blair and the modernisation of New Labour. Today our danger is to defend traditionalist new Labour solutions on every issue because this will consign us to defeat. It is my rejection of this New Labour nostalgia that makes me the modernising candidate at this election.
To win next time, it is the New Labour comfort zone that we must escape: the rigidity of old formulae that have served their time, the belittling of any attempt to move on from past verities and the belief that more of the same is the way to win.
New Labour was right to seek to build a coalition of lower and middle income support, show we can create wealth as well as distribute it and speak to people’s aspirations. We need to keep doing all these things. But old-fashioned New Labour thinking about what this means today in electoral strategy, policy and style of leadership is now an obstacle to winning the next election and transforming our society.
Start with electoral politics: New Labour’s proposition was simple – we need to persuade Tory voters to come to us. The task is very different now. Five million votes were lost by Labour between 1997 and 2010, but 4 out of the 5 million didn’t go to the Conservatives. One-third went to the Liberal Democrats, and most of the rest simply stopped voting.
It wasn’t, in the main, the most affluent, professional voters that deserted Labour either. New analysis has been produced by Ipsos/Mori which shows the scale of loss among lower income groups. Between 1997 and 2010, for every one voter that Labour lost from the professional classes (so called ‘ABs’), we lost three voters among the poorest, those on benefits and the low paid (DEs). You really don’t need to be a Bennite to believe that this represents a crisis of working-class representation for Labour—and our electability.
Add in skilled manual workers, and the differential goes to six to one. Almost all the new Tory voters came from these social groups. Put it at its starkest, if we had enjoyed a 1997 result in 2010 just among DEs, then on a uniform swing we would have won at least 40 more seats and would still be the largest party in parliament. Seats like Stroud, Hastings & Rye, and Corby would have stayed Labour. The core Labour vote that some thought could be taken for granted became the swing vote that went Conservative.
We also need to understand that the danger of people switching from our party to others has been joined by the danger of people simply drifting out of voting—and disproportionately among our supporters. The gap between turnout among ABs and DEs grew from 13 to 19 points between 1997 and 2010.
This is bad for democracy and particularly dangerous for us. We need to take this skewing of the electorate far more seriously than we have done in the past. As President Obama has shown in the United States, expanding the electorate is part of a winning strategy as well as winning back voters who have gone elsewhere.
We can neither win an election with a working-class vote alone—New Labour was right about that—nor can we take it for granted. But the problem of conventional New Labour analysis applies to white collar voters too. Particularly when it comes to the South of England, we sometimes clung to an illusory picture whereby we imagined
easy affluence to run wider than it did. Half of the people in work in Reading, where the Conservatives got one of their biggest swings to take Reading West, earn less than £21, 000 a year. Even in Britain’s more comfortable places, people increasingly feel insecure, overstretched and distant from rich elites.
Furthermore, many of the affluent voters themselves didn’t go blue, they went yellow–the Conservative vote has fallen among ABs since 1997. In a number of seats, like Hornsey and Wood Green or Manchester Withington, we lost to the Liberal Democrats because of desertion over issues such as Iraq, civil liberties and tuition fees and in many other places, the Labour vote was depressed, thereby letting the Tories in by the back door.
All this requires a refounding of Labour, as profound as New Labour in the mid- 1990s. Our working-class base cannot be dismissed as a ‘core vote’ and taken for granted, we need to understand the real landscape of middle England to strengthen our appeal to voters right across the income scale, we need to recognise the concerns and
nature of modern affluence, and we need to change our style of leadership.
To do this we need, just as we did at the start of New Labour, to go back to our core values and apply them to the world in which we find ourselves. We need to understand what our belief in equality, fairness and opportunity means in the face not just of the electoral situation, but also the economic and social condition of Britain.
This rethink is all the more important because many of the good things that happened under new Labour were possible because we used the proceeds of growth to support public services and redistribution. Given the fiscal constraints, this route to social justice is going to be much more constrained for the foreseeable future.
First, the renewal required in relation to Labour’s so-called ‘traditional’ vote is perhaps most profound. We need to tell a story about how we can improve people’s lives, starting with the way we approach the economy.
That begins by revisiting New Labour’s recipe for the jobs Britain can create. A low skill, low wage economy that is over-reliant on service industries is not the future that people aspire too. Instead, we should build on the active industrial policy that we came to late in our term in office, and which had already helped develop the beginnings of an electric vehicle industry, an offshore wind industry and a nuclear power renaissance in Britain. By supporting British business, we can create high quality manufacturing jobs, and under my leadership we would.
We also need to think again about our approach to labour markets. What became a dogmatic attraction to maximum flexibility meant poorer wages and conditions, and we need to address that. We need to learn the lesson from other countries that raising the floor in the labour market can be a more sustainable route to both better conditions and stronger growth. Creating stronger incentives for companies to invest in their workforce can have a powerful impact on productivity and provide a stronger platform for the future.
That is why I am for a living wage over £7 an hour, not just a minimum wage, so people can feel more comfortable that they will get a decent day’s wage for a decent day’s work. I am for greater protection for time outside work so people don’t feel compelled to work harder for longer for less.
This new approach will help address the issue which Labour candidates heard so much about on the doorstep: immigration. Eastern European immigration is a class issue because it increases competition for jobs, particularly those at lower wages. It looks very different if you are an employee rather than an employer. But we refused to recognise that sufficiently. Similarly, concerns about preferential access to housing — often false — built up because we refused to prioritise the building of new social housing. If we want to win back our lost support, this can no longer be a marginal issue.
Second, we must speak to aspiration and recognise where we need change from the past in order to meet people’s hopes for the future. The burden of University debt is big issue for swathes of parents—and their kids. That is why I have proposed we scrap tuition fees and replace them with a graduate tax.
But we must recognise as New Labour sometimes didn’t that aspiration is not simply about earning and owning, but also enjoying time with your family. So our economic strategy should change the culture of working time. It’s not just the low paid in Britain who work the longest hours in Western Europe, don’t get a chance to read to their kids, and feel stressed out.
Third, we must recognise that people, including affluent voters, care about tax but also about the sort of society we live in. I will unashamedly argue for a more equal society because I believe it harms the rich as well as the poor to live in a country which is increasingly unequal. I will argue for a society characterised by responsibility at all levels – from bankers pay to people who can work but at the moment are not doing so. I will make the case for a greener society because climate change is the greatest challenge to our way of life.
We must also be reformers of the state to make it more democratic, more open, more efficient and less overbearing. Alan Johnson’s view expressed last week that “I can’t think of a single issue on which Labour got the balance wrong on civil liberties” speaks to an understandable desire to defend the past, but if we don’t recognise and put right our mistakes, we won’t win back those who have left us.
Face it: we never convinced people of the case for ninety days of summary detention without charge, or ID cards and they spoke to a belief in an off-putting overpowerful state. I am for CCTV and measures that work, but under my leadership, we will not be casual with civil liberties. As important, we must have the courage to accept where we got things wrong and change our approach. Without that, we will not win again.
Fourth, we need to change our style of politics. Disconnection from voters, including our working-class base, is not just a product of policy error, it is the result of the hollowing out of the movement and the party. In part, this hollowing out is a long-term trend that faces political parties in many parts of the industrialised world. But in
part it happened because people left us over specific issues like Iraq and it is also a product of a particular approach to the role of the Labour Party.
A Labour party member in Cornwall, Nick, put it best when he said to me that New Labour had behaved as if “the role of the Labour leader is to protect the country from the views of the members of the Labour Party”. That may have been necessary in the 1980s, but Neil Kinnock’s Conference speech about Militant took place twenty five years ago. We can’t still let ourselves be haunted by those ghosts. Unless we change this style of leadership we will never change society in the way we aspire to do because we will never have the political movement we need.
We need that movement because we can only win the arguments we need to win— both in Opposition and in government—-if we have a movement that can sustain us and from which our ideas emerge. That outward looking, vibrant movement comes from high ideals and party members who recognise that we are hearing their voice. And anyone who thinks that listening to our party is somehow pandering is doing them a great disservice. Indeed, if we had listened more to them, we would have been a better government not a worse one: on housing, on agency workers, on tuition fees.
Of course, no leader is ever going to agree with everything their party members believe. And we need to forge a winning coalition which reaches out well beyond traditional supporters of our party. But the answer to this is to build a party which connects us to the public, and that must also include an understanding of the strength that could come from our trade union link.
The crisis of support among our working-class base shows the ground we have to make up. The relationship with the trade union movement needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Part of the problem is that MPs are not connected locally to the trade union levy payers. As a start, each MP should be reaching out to these levy payers and hearing their voice with regular dialogue and meetings.
The final change we need as part of our future is political confidence. New Labour was ultimately quite pessimistic about the ability of our values to speak to a progressive majority in Britain. Contrast this with the self-confidence of the new coalition government: nobody would really believe that the Conservatives won just 36% of the vote at the election. While Labour often acts like squatters in government, the Tories act like they deserve to be there.
That pessimism about what is possible is now a barrier to winning again, not just to creating the kind of country we believe in. Unless we address issue of low wages, working time, inequality, we will never reach out to those people we have lost and make politics seem like it might have an impact on their lives.
New Labour nostalgia says that there is a tension between our values and our electability. But the truth is that the opposite is the case. Whether you look at our approach to the excesses of markets, or our belief in a foreign policy based on our values, not just our alliances; the morally right and the electorally right thing to do come together. We lost because people lost a sense of who we are and what we stand for. To win again, we need to restore our clarity of purpose.
Only with a politics based on clear values can we win again. Indeed, it is by speaking openly and clearly about what we believe that we can best get back into power. Head and heart come together in a politics based on clear values, a sense of who we stand up for, and a vision of the good society.
Impressive isn’t it? If you want to find out more, or get involved in Ed’s campaign then go to http://www.edmiliband.org
I should admit right at the outset that I have a bit of a rose-tinted view of Tony Benn. My views on the great man have been flavoured less on the 80s firebrand and more on elder statesman, diarist
and conscience of the party. After retiring as MP so as to concentrate more time to politics, he is now leading a call for “ordinary people” to revolt against “the most savage spending cuts since the 1930′s. It is easy to dismiss Tony Benn as a figure of a bygone era, a rabid left-wing politician that has no place in the post-ideological political age. But that is to do him, and his campaign, a huge disservice.
The proposed spending cuts have the potential to destroy livelihoods. Although the coalition remain steadfast that “we are all in this together” the reality will be very different. Increases in VAT, an £11billion cut in the welfare budget and 25% reductions across government departments will all hit the most vulnerable the hardest. It is not millionaire business leaders or bankers that will feel the pain but single mothers, the disabled and their carers. And it is not just service users that will be affected. Internal Treasury documents estimate 1.3million public and private sector job losses over the course of this parliament, all piling more pressure onto whatever services remain.
Policies that have such a negative impact on so many people’s lives must be resisted. Organising communities, holding public meetings and taking to the streets should be embraced by the left, with local Labour parties sitting at the heart of these protests. But protest alone is not enough, if you believe the coalition government, and huge swathes of the media, there is simply no alternative to cuts. The responsibility of all those vying for the Labour leadership is to prove this statement untrue by articulating a viable alternative.
We cannot allow ourselves to get into a situation where as a party we accept the premise of cuts but then argue against them on a one-by-one basis. It does not sound credible and will just further shrink the publics trust in politicians, with Labour as the principal leader. Instead we need to deliver a positive message for change – an alternative and fairer way of doing business. For me Ed Miliband is currently the one best articulating this. Slower deficit reduction, more onus on progressive taxation and support for small business are all key platforms of an alternative economic plan and these, along with a campaign for the living wage, are the central themes of Ed’s campaign. I urge you all to support him.
In the meantime however rather than looking inwards, local Labour parties need to be taking the fight to the government – this means getting on-board the ‘Bennite Revolt’. Whilst our potential leaders slug it out, we need to organise within our communities and deliver our future leader (whoever that maybe) a vibrant grassroots movement willing to fight for an alternative to the vile campaign of cuts being proposed by this government.
And well they should be smiling. With formal nominations now closed the race for the leadership is becoming very much a sibling affair. So here are the scores on the doors and an explanation of what happens next.
In short David has a lead amongst MPs and Constituencies but Ed has a significant advantage within the Union section, not just in numbers but also in scale with the big 3 all supporting him. So, what does this mean? In a sense, nothing. The nominations only indicate support for a leader. The days of block votes are long gone and each individual member has the opportunity to vote for their personal preference. Having said that, momentum is everything and it is clear that ‘the Mo’ is with the Miliband brothers.
For those of you who are not Labour party geeks here is a bit of guidance of what will happen next. Rather than a straight, simple election the Labour Party has a slightly more complex ‘Electoral College’ with MPs, Trade Unions and affiliated societies and the Labour party membership each getting a third of the votes. The idea behind this is to equalise power across the different sections of the party, ensuring no-one holds too much sway but that everyone is fully represented. In a peculiar twist it also means that some people will actually get 3 votes – for instance if you are an MP who is also an individual member and a member of a trade union.Ballot papers will land from the 1st September, with the result announced at conference on the 25th September.The vote itself is known as a transferable eliminating ballot (not so different to the Alternative Vote system that we will all get a chance to vote on sometime next year). This means that, if no-one can claim 50%+1 of all votes cast in the first round, whoever comes bottom of the poll will be eliminated and their 2nd preference votes added to the original totals – this will continue until there is an outright winner. Simple
As for who I am backing? Well it is going to be Ed. He is running a positive, issues based campaign that really resonates with me. As importantly, he of all candidates, grasps the importance of organising to win. Labour as a party has forgotten how to build a grass-roots movement through energetic, timely local campaigns. Ed’s team seem to be building exactly this kind of movement in their bid for the leadership and it great to see. If you want to see more of what I am talking about visit his website here.
