The ideas behind the Miliband battle
politics.co.uk checks in on some of the ideas – good, bad and indifferent – being bandied around by Ed and David Miliband.
By Ian Dunt
David Miliband – Labour must move away from the “comfort zone” of automatically opposing every coalition policy
It’s a difficult trick, knowing when to make a fuss. Opposition parties are essentially babies, learning how to manipulate their mother appropriately. If you cry every time, the tactic backfires. If you never cry, she’ll assume nothing needs to change.
Without any real leadership (Harriet Harman appears to have literally disappeared this summer) Labour has lashed out habitually at the government, which largely set the news agenda over the summer months. From Asbos to the deficit, nearly every government pronouncement has been met by sour-faced rejection from the opposition.
David Miliband raises an important point: you need to pick your battles, or the public will tire of you. This was a lesson David Cameron and George Osborne learnt early on, and demonstrated most effectively when they signed up to Labour spending commitments. They pulled away eventually of course, but that early move made people sit up and take notice, and presented the pair as serious and legitimate.
Ed Miliband – “Remaining in the New Labour comfort zone would consign us to opposition.”
Presumably true. New Labour lost the election, and if ‘comfort zone’ is a substitute phrase for lack of change, it logically consigns Labour to opposition. But which aspects of New Labour have to be jettisoned? All candidates have vowed they want change, from Ed Ball’s lack of democratic culture to Andy Burnham’s criticism of elitism. But which policies do you dump?
The real message of the quote is that Labour must scurry to the left, as Ed Miliband instinctively believed when the results came in. Is there mileage in that? Possibly more than centre-right newspapers or David Miliband would have you believe. Spending cuts are already an emotional issue, but by the time they bite, the debate will become heavily polarised. The Liberal Democrats will continue to haemorrhage support, especially among lefties, students and those alienated by Blair’s foreign policy. Being a firmly left-wing party could be a far more successful tactic in two years time than it was when New Labour was born.
David Miliband – “Labour under new leadership must engage with the big issues facing Britain with an openness, a freshness, a vivacity unlike anything it has seen. The closest parallel I can think of is the Tories’ rethink under RA Butler after they lost the 1945 general election.”
An extremely interesting comparison, this. RA Butler was passed over twice for the leadership of the Tory party, but he had more of an influence on it than most of those who eventually took the top post. As the man who accepted Labour’s creation of the welfare state, he exhibited an awareness of his political circumstances and a feeling for history. He allowed the Conservative party to survive a period of immense change, and even to win power just a few years after Clement Atlee’s party took charge.
Raising his memory now suggests David Miliband is prepared to not just restrict his attacks as opposition leader, but also to adopt major parts of the coalition agenda in full. The main issue in the incoming leader’s in-tray is, of course, the deficit. If you accept the need for cuts but question just the timing, it’s hard to define how distinct your position is, as Gordon Brown discovered at the last election. You also lose much of the support from unions and public sector workers, who will be desperate to oppose the deficit reduction plan. But if you reject it outright, the coalition will paint you as a ‘deficit-denier’ (they love this phrase).
David Miliband could be talking about a change in Labour’s approach to civil liberties, but it seems unlikely. He didn’t bring it up once during his speech. Alternatively, this could be about adapting to an age of party cooperation rather than party-political dog fighting. If so, he might just be onto a winner.
Ed Miliband – “We need to change in order to attract all of these lost voters back to Labour, and that includes the 1.6 million voters we lost to the Liberal Democrats, and it also means attracting back the three million working families whose votes we lost, as well as the more affluent voters.”
Ed Miliband ties together various strands of political categories here in a bid to create a coalition of the left – from alienated manual workers to alienated Guardian reading teachers still angry about Iraq. Critics of the shadow energy secretary call this a comfort zone, and insist it is like giving Labour a warm but ultimately pointless hug. In truth, the debate is more complicated than that. New Labour was based on the assumption that an explicitly left wing party would never win power – or keep it. Redistribution had to be done, if at all, in secret. But times have changed, and with mass redundancies, reduced benefits and ever-rising bankers’ bonuses around the corner, the Miliband tactic may not be as naïve or ineffective as some believe, especially if the Tories fail to get their vote out.
Jon Cruddas – “Attacking the Liberals is wrong. There’s a danger of us spraying too much lead across the forecourt and not really thinking about how we need to regroup. We need to have respect for and show courtesy towards different traditions as part of an overall, plural realignment across the centre and the left – that’s what’s going to be needed.”
Jon Cruddas threw everything into confusion when he backed David Miliband as party leader. The left-wing figurehead was expected to go for the younger sibling but was alienated, among other things, by the attacks on the Lib Dems. Ed Miliband has not been the only Labour political tempted into firing off salvoes against the party. Harriet Harman dedicated most of her Budget response to them.
Cruddas makes an interesting point in that he doesn’t question the political ramification of attacking the Lib Dems but the decency of it. They are fellow travellers, and it’s just a little ungentlemanly.
The forecourt metaphor taps in to David Miliband’s more considered approach to opposition, rather than the all-out attack Ed Miliband has exhibited during the election campaign.
Ultimately, the Miliband spat tells us little we didn’t already know. David will be disciplined in his centrism, considered in his approach, and aim at appearing prime ministerial in time for the 2015 election. We don’t really know how he will respond to the deficit reduction plan, but it seems likely he will attack its radicalism while accepting its assumptions. Ed Miliband will wage all-out war against the coalition, opening as wide an umbrella for the left as he can manage.
It’s as foolish to reduce David Miliband to a Blairite as it is to reduce his brother to a Bennite, but the two men’s starting assumptions remain the same. David Miliband doesn’t believe a left-wing party can win an election. Ed Miliband thinks all that’s necessary to win an election is for the left to be united. It’s quite likely they’re both wrong.
