Comment: Where is the opposition?
David Cameron mastered the art of refraining from policies in opposition. But Ed Miliband is mistaken if he thinks he can try the same trick.
By Ian Dunt
Headline writers over the weekend became typically excited when Alan Johnson admitted to the BBC that there were still policy differences between him and Ed Miliband. Actually, Johnson’s comments on tuition fees and the 50p top rate of tax were nothing new. He wrote a comment piece backing tuition fees in a national newspaper a day after Miliband’s election as leader, which is a curious way to keep a secret.
His willingness to talk publicly about the divisions tells us something about the state of the Labour party, however. It’s not so much split, as suffering from multiple fractures. The Brown-Blair tribalism continues to influence the thinking of many MPs. Both camps despise the Old Labour types, who demand a more left wing agenda. The war in Iraq left the party stumbling through its future, struggling to recognise itself when it looked in a mirror.
Ed Miliband has enemies everywhere, and he knows it. The old guard were furiously briefing the media against him within minutes of his election as party leader. The Blairites consider him a Brownite. The left are uncomfortable with his commitment to support some cuts and oppose strike action. The right hates him for criticising the record on Iraq, civil liberties and executive salaries. Strategists are baffled by his decision to back Ken Clarke’s criminal justice reforms just as political space emerges for being ‘tough on crime’. Supporters of his brother bide their time on the margins, hoping an alternative power centre can develop on the backbenches.
Given the range of challenges facing him, many commentators would consider it a job well done if Miliband were to lose the next election but emerge with a united, healed party. It is tempting to give Labour the benefit of the doubt, to assume that the party’s current silence is a result of behind-the-scenes efforts to cement Miliband’s authority.
ALso, but there is precedent. Namely David Cameron, who turned the art of policy reticence into an art form. Cameron didn’t present policies for years. As he is finding out now, laying our cards on the table wins you enemies.
But Miliband is severely mistaken if he thinks he can get away with the same trick. Cameron was operating in an entirely different political period. He was opposing a tired old government that acted as if it could barely be bothered to get out of bed in the morning.
Things are different now. We are undergoing one of the most radical, far-reaching and ferocious bouts of law making in British political history. The economic changes are staggering, amounting to a revolution in the way the British economy is run, with a monumental shift from the public sector built up under Labour to a private sector whose recovery we can in no way assume. A controversial economic agenda is being dressed up as a consensus. But it’s not just at the Treasury. Wherever you look, there is revolution.
The Home Office is working its way through the laws of the last 13 years, tearing up bills as part of its freedom agenda. The Department of Communities and Local Government is redefining the phrase slash and burn. The Department of Health is undergoing a complete overhaul of the way it organises the NHS. Welfare is undergoing arguably the biggest change since the war. And that’s not to mention Michael Gove’s potentially game-changing free school agenda.
Some of those policies are appalling. Some are extremely welcome. All of them are hugely important. Having a blunted, navel-gazing opposition at this moment in time is historically unacceptable. But the sense you get from meeting Miliband’s top team is of a profoundly relaxed, almost slouching attitude to the task ahead.
Labour’s role became more constitutionally relevant the second the coalition was formed. Without an effective opposition, Britain became something akin to a one-party state. The party never had the fortune of time to lick its wounds. But given the scale and controversy of the government programme, its role becomes more pivotal still. On a host of issues, we simply do not know what the opposition thinks.
In some cases, the party is silenced by its own historic commitment to triangulation, where it stepped into enemy territory to wrong foot the Tories. Having first supported tuition fees and academies, it now struggles to formulate a convincing rebuttal of these ideas, in the same way that mothers rarely enjoy the prospect of strangling their children.
In others, the policies the party claims to have are so tepid and half-hearted that they barely qualify for the word. Watching the opposition benches bicker about the details of housing benefit and welfare is pretty unappetising. This is particularly acute on housing benefit, where the minor adjustments Labour demands are delivered with a Biblical rhetoric entirely at odds with the shallow nature of its actual policy response.
In other areas there is simply an emptiness. What, for instance, is Labour’s policy on civil liberties? We know Miliband’s ‘I’m sorry’ message’ during the leadership campaign, and we heard his conference speech reiterating that. Since then, he installed Phil Woolas, hardly a John Stuart Mill acolyte, as shadow immigration minister, before unceremoniously dumping him following the court case. He then made Ed Balls, of all people, shadow home secretary. The move was more a result of internal political pressures, but placing his authoritarian attack dog on the precise brief which should see him supporting many of Theresa May’s liberties plans sent a weird, worrying message. Simply sitting there passively and shouting ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to government plans to scrap individual anti-terror laws is insufficient, especially given Labour was responsible for originally formulating it.
The country deserves a proper opposition. It’s a hard hand to be dealt: a divided party, a crushing election defeat and no time to heal before turning out a coherent opposition agenda, but that’s the way with politics. To quote Marx: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Whatever your political views, the country needs a more coherent, believable opposition than this at such a pivotal moment. It’s too late to expect one before Christmas. But the Miliband team needs to return in the New Year with a renewed sense of purpose.
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