Ed Miliband « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Ed Miliband’

The return of the far-left: a turning point for Labour

04/04/2012, 07:40:18 AM

by Rob Marchant

Politics has its own rhythm. It is governed partly by obvious dates, like general elections, but partly by longer-term movements in the tectonic plates. It is easy to overestimate by-elections – the media almost invariably do – but I suspect that Bradford West might just be one of the few that historians remember.

Until Thursday, it was all going so well: but only because the Tory-led government had been in disarray all week, not because of anything that Labour had done. The fact that Labour could lose an entirely safe seat to George Galloway, who won an extraordinary 56% of the vote, means that Labour will want to, at the very least, review its approach.

Aside from the unpleasant re-emergence of sectarian politics, there are two obvious stories: one is Labour’s collapse, for which we might come up with a lot of distinct reasons and which is already being dissected at length.

But while we might debate those reasons, the impact of Labour’s collapse is clear. Above all, the impact on its political credibility.

Oppositions usually win by-elections: a result which hands such a high proportion to a newcomer does not generally happen to oppositions where everything is in order. Rather to parties where the wheels are starting to fall off, as Roy Jenkins showed when he won 42% of the vote in Warrington in 1981. Someone now really needs to explain, convincingly, why this case is different.

The other major story, as Dan Hodges rightly identifies , is the resurgence of the far left as a political force. This matters to Labour in a way it does not to the Tories or Lib Dems. And many commentators are in shock about this second story. Indeed, until Thursday, many found it laughable the idea that the pro-Islamist, anti-American far left was on its way back into respectable politics.

They’re not laughing now.

So let’s look a little closer: why would this comeback happen now and not, say, in the late 1990s or early 2000s? Three reasons spring to mind.

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How Ed can fight back after Bradford West

30/03/2012, 01:43:02 PM

by Samuel Dale

If ever there was a wake-up call, this is it. Not since 1987 when Labour lost the Greenwich by-election to the SDP has the party faced such a devastating loss.

Last week there were some positive signs, Miliband’s good performance in response to the budget or harrying of the Tories over donorgate and pastygate shouldn’t just be forgotten. But now more than ever this needs to be harnessed and turned into something tangible and lasting. A narrative that can run until the next election.

He is capable of doing it but there is one problem. It’s the economy, idiots. Labour still lacks credibility and until it regains it, sporadic good polling and Tory slip ups will remain shallow and electoral success a far off dream.

In all of the soul-searching that is to ensue next week Ed Miliband has a chance to address this core problem. The biggest issue is the impression that Labour was profligate with the public purse and that caused the crisis. It’s not true but it’s the impression.

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Is this the beginning of the end for Ed Miliband?

30/03/2012, 07:55:37 AM

by Atul Hatwal

This morning it’s a cold new world. But as the shock passes and the harsh reality of George Galloway’s crushing victory begins to sink in, the questions will become louder and more insistent. Two in particular will dominate: How could this happen? And what does it mean for the leader?

The party briefers will try to box this result as a freak. They will cite the combined effect of the swing from Labour towards Respect among the British Pakistani community and the collapse in Tory vote as a localised one-off.

They will be wrong.

The vote demonstrates two critical points: first, hell will freeze over before large numbers of Tories switch to Labour. After the week the Tories have had, it’s not surprising their vote was down. But Labour picked up no Conservative switchers and remains toxic to swing voters.

The reality is, for too many people, Labour under Ed Miliband is not a viable alternative. The polls on leadership and economic competence have been unrelenting since he became leader.

Earlier this month the Guardian’s ICM poll placed David Cameron and George Osborne 17% ahead of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls on managing the economy 42% to 25%. Meanwhile YouGov’s latest March figures on peoples’ preference to be prime minister had David Cameron 20% ahead of Ed Miliband 38% to 18% – that’s double the lead he held at the same point last year.

Second, the British Pakistani community has sent a clear signal to a party that has long taken their vote for granted: no more. Labour has spent two years since the general election agonising about Mrs.Duffy, Englishness and what are euphemistically called “white working class issues”. Well, congratulations, this is the result.

Simply cranking the handle on decaying community political machines and expecting the sheep to file through the pen will not work forever. When George Galloway condemned Labour’s use of “biraderi” or clan-based politics last night, he was right.

At some point Labour as a party will have to engage with its former ethnic minority supporters rather than just assume they will be there, regardless of whatever the party does.

But in one sense, there really is no excuse for such total and utter shock. This isn’t the first time that a feeling has taken hold in a formerly Labour supporting electorate that the party is no longer upto leading or even interested in the local community.

What just happened in Bradford now happens in Scotland as a matter of course. For Alex Salmond read George Galloway and the pattern begins to look a little more familiar.

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Time for Ed and Cam to grow up on funding

28/03/2012, 07:00:23 AM

by Peter Watt

The cringe inducing video of Peter Cruddas promising supper with Sam and David with comic buffoonery was still leading the news. The nod and a wink about the promise of policy input into (something called) the number ten policy committee of course took this to another level. At a stroke it went from being just another “cash for access story” to “cash for policy” – the real daddy of political sleaze. Having said that, I was actually still quite optimistic on Sunday, maybe this time there would be a political deal; maybe this time our politicians will sort it out; maybe this time there would be legislation fundamentally reforming the funding of political parties?

But by Monday evening the optimism was dashed. Once again the ugly head of tribal politics intervened. Ed Miliband and Francis Maude stood at the respective dispatch boxes and shouted at each other. It was horrifically depressing. Neither of them in my view did politics any favours, despite the supportive bellowing from their respective benches behind them. The public, to the extent that they were watching, must have thought, “WTF was that” because it certainly wasn’t edifying.

None of the parties has much to boast about here. Each has their list of scandals involving party and MP finances. It is all too easy to get dragged in, as I very well know. Some scandals involve people trying to personally gain while some involve mistakes, or are the result of playing within the rules but not within the spirit of them. All though, involve a further nail in the coffin of the reputation of politics, as a sceptical public do not draw any distinction as to the motives. I know that I certainly regret my part in the succession of stories that have damaged politics.

Now if someone decides to feather their own nest and act corruptly there is probably not much that we can do about it, but there is something that we can do to reduce the risk of other funding scandals. Because the harsh truth is that the current system encourages the parties to push at the boundaries of the legislation passed ostensibly to clean up politics. Just as people perfectly reasonably employ accountants to help them avoid tax, so political parties employ people to maximise the income that they can receive. After all, why should they turn a gift horse away? So loop holes are found and exploited. Legal? Yes. Acceptable? Certainly not to the public.

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How Labour has misread voters on the deficit

09/03/2012, 08:30:21 AM

by Atul Hatwal

On Tuesday, Ed Miliband did what should have been a good thing.

His speech on the need for a more active industrial policy was rooted in common sense. Ideas like a British bank tasked with expanding business lending are widely supported. And it was a neat idea to back an existing campaign by British manufacturers for a “made in Britain” label.

Although sceptics will always roll their eyes at a buy British campaign, the politics were right. Identifying the party with a business led initiative that had lots of businesses ready to talk positively about the proposal is a world away from “predators and producers”.

The government did their bit too, issuing a rebuttal comment that talked about the need for global trade and international business. The dividing line could not have been clearer – Labour backing British business while the government opened the next round of GATT negotiations with the public.

But despite receiving as warm a reception as he has enjoyed for an economic policy speech, what thanks did Ed Miliband get? Minutes after the applause he was fighting off a baying mob on Radio 5 live.

It was impossible not to feel sorry for him. The leader offered the usual platitudes about the scale of the task facing Labour, building up support slowly and getting a warm reception up and down the country. But it was just chaff.

What Ed Miliband reaped was in part the inevitable result of Labour’s economic strategy.

The last election was lost on the deficit. The electoral challenge for this parliament: which party is most trusted to reduce it.

In a way, Labour has understood this and developed a strategy that does indeed address the deficit.

Every press release issued by the economic team is rigorously consistent. The headline is almost always about poor growth with a clear causal link made in the story between growth, unemployment, reduced tax revenues and a worsening deficit.

Great. Job done, right?

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Welcome to the 2010s: the era of reactive, populist, say-anything politics

22/02/2012, 12:00:59 PM

by Rob Marchant

What has David Cameron done so far, which has marked him out as a prime minister? The answer is, surprisingly little, as John Rentoul observes in the Independent on Sunday: “…the Prime Minister seems unformed. He is adroit at reacting to events, but not so good at making them happen.”

But that does not mean he is unpopular (despite lots of potential reasons for this to be so), or that he will lose the next general election. It is just an example of an era, post-2010, which has seemingly been defined by a lack of seriousness of purpose on the part of the major parties.

Cameron has scored a few political successes. He has done what few would have predicted: he has put together, and held together, a coalition that has lasted nearly two years and will quite likely last five.

He has been successful, thus far, in winning public support for his eminently populist handbagging of his EU partners, although only time will tell whether he was wise to do so. He is generally felt to have had a “good war” in Libya.

But as regards defining a domestic policy direction for his government, he has relatively little to show: an austerity program, showing strength but courting unpopularity; and education reforms which are competent and probably modestly positive with the public, although mostly despised by Labour. The rest is largely either a blur, with no significant impact made, or a mess.

Now compare and contrast with his coalition partner. Clegg made a textbook populist pitch before the election, “an end to politics as usual”, before demonstrating eighteen days later, via the person of David Laws, that he represented just the opposite.

Being a junior coalition partner encourages populism, because of one’s limited impact on events and the inevitable going along with large numbers of things which you do not like. There’s not much else you can do: hence the rubbish about “alarm clock Britain”, Clegg’s desperate and probably doomed scrabbling around for a distinct identity for his party.

And lastly - in the order in which the media currently treat the three parties – we come to Labour. Miliband at times seems populist, but it is not in the sense that most people would recognise. And this is because his populism is mostly directed inwards, at his own party, and what they want to hear.

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Modernisation is harder for Labour than the Tories

14/02/2012, 07:00:58 AM

by Kevin Meagher

It’s worth pondering how Churchill did it. Not winning the war; there is no shortage of history books telling us how he did that – not least by the man himself.

No I am talking about how he won back power so quickly in 1951 – just six years after suffering a catastrophic election defeat at the hands of Clem Attlee’s great reforming Labour government.

Labour cruised to victory in 1945, winning a 145-seat majority. The Tories were trounced, losing 190 MPs.

But it was more serious than that. Theirs’ was an intellectual defeat too. The right-wing historian Andrew Roberts once claimed that an entire generation of Tory politicians were “emasculated” by the defeat. Labour genuinely enthused the electorate with the promise of change for the many: the creation of the NHS, the welfare state, full employment and the nationalisation of key industries. The post-war world was Labour’s.

The Tory party was not just beaten; it was invalidated as a party of government. Its jingoism, servility to wealth and malign neglect of the poor were crushed by the optimism of the possibility of change. “Let us face the future” was Labour’s election slogan. The audacity of hope, so to speak.

Pre-war memories lingered. The dreadfulness of the 1930s was still raw. Churchill’s wartime leadership aside, the Tories were still the nasty party of the Jarrow March, grinding poverty and the misery of mass unemployment.

Yet in 1951 an even more stooped and aged Churchill returned. The Tories were back in business. Six years from political oblivion to triumph. How did they manage it?

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Bonnie prince Davy, Labour’s lost king

03/02/2012, 09:25:15 AM

by Atul Hatwal

The king over the water is an alluring concept. Over the water the grass is greener. Hopes and aspirations are nurtured, castles built in the air.

Rarely does the inconvenience of reality intrude on the floating possibility or what might be, if only the king could return.

Followers of faraway kings tend to assume away questions on what their leader would actually do with power and fixate on removing the undeserving incumbent.

For all those years in the early 2000s, legions of Brownites (back in the days when such a grouping existed) didn’t give a second thought to tricky details like an alternative policy programme. All would be fine. Plans were bound to have been made by pointy headed wonks in backrooms somewhere. What mattered most was removing Blair. That was the business of politics.

And so the wheel turns and now its bonnie prince Davy who awaits with a promise of a better tomorrow.

The reaction across the media to David Miliband’s article in the New Statesman is defined by lost leader syndrome. All the reporting has been entirely through the prism of a leadership challenge, nothing on the substance of what he’s saying.

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The nice party isn’t going to get into government

15/01/2012, 11:26:57 AM

by Dan McCurry

Ed Miliband has never attended the Cenotaph in his donkey jacket, nor has he screamed from a podium, “Yeeeaaaar alright”. But the difference is that those leaders existed at a time when Labour was ungovernable, or they made Labour governable, and it took everything out of them. Ed, on the other hand, was gifted a benign set of circumstances, but has led us into decline.

If there is a plot against him, then I’d hardly be the first to know. But if there is, it won’t happen until May. With the London elections such a knife edge business, no one wants to rock the boat. This means one of two things: either Ed has the chance of being the turnaround kid, or the Labour party (on the national stage) is in for a lame duck period.

Maybe it is too late for Ed Miliband. I’m not ruling out a bolt from the blue that will reignite his leadership, but I think luck tends to hang out with those who have chutzpah. And if Cameron can be admired for one thing only, he knows how to brazen it out.

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