Ed Miliband « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Ed Miliband’

The big week uncut: what next?

03/10/2010, 02:00:39 PM

As Dan Hodges noted in Friday’s column (below), Labour reached the end of a long road in Manchester. If anyone needed closure on the New Labour project, we had it last week.

It was a journey which had begun where it ended: at Labour party conference.

Neil Kinnock’s 1985 speech in Brighton marked the start of a fight back which took 12 years to come to fruition and 13 more to end in failure.

Neil was the father of New Labour, but he was never part of it. With the passion that he showed in that brave and beautiful speech, he knew that we needed it. But he wished we didn’t. He would have preferred it the old way. By the end, he even knew that what we needed wasn’t him. (Just as he knew that it wasn’t John Smith either). But he could only be himself.

That is why he is so attached to Ed, who isn’t New Labour either. Ed was a contented but never ideologically committed member of the outer circle. He often notes that he wasn’t factional. This was helped by his not being political either.

There is nothing new or unusual here. Blair and Brown, for instance, were fellow travellers in Peter Hain’s Tribune group during the 1980s. It was a necessary accommodation with the prevailing orthodoxy.

Nor is it a weak position. It was Stalin who issued the Blairite dictum that “theory guides practice, but practice is the criterion of ideological truth”. And, whatever he was, Stalin was not weak.

Ed Miliband’s ruthlessness is beyond question. If he has a lack which comes to seem weak, it will be consistency, not cruelty.

Many whom one would call New Labour or old right very actively campaigned for Ed Miliband. And it is those influential individuals, not the facile nebula that is the term ‘the unions’, who are mainly responsible for Ed Miliband’s victory.

Which term (responsible) is apt in two senses: both cause and obligation.

So it is to them, as much as to Ed himself – and to his brother staked out in Primrose Hill-les-Deux-Eglises – that we pose the week’s overwhelming question: after New Labour, after permanent revolution and endless victory, what next?

Jonathan Todd warns of Osborne’s traps on the economy

David Prescott on David Miliband’s big speech

Kevin Meagher looks at the new leader’s in tray

Siôn Simon sketches Ed Miliband’s big speech

Peter Watt says the last thing we need is a membership drive

Jamie Reed MP looks beyond London for the shadow cabinet

Dan Hodges responds to Labour’s extraordinary week in Manchester

Sunder Katwala on Labour’s top baron: BAME voting in the leadership election

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Sunday News Review

03/10/2010, 07:55:39 AM

Whelan wot won it?

Asked to define himself by the BBC’s James Naughtie last week, Charlie Whelan paused for a second before replying. “Old generation – time to move on”. If Mr Whelan, 56, spin doctor for Gordon Brown-turned-trade union political officer, really does “move on”, spending more time salmon fishing beside the banks of his beloved River Spey, and even possibly writing a book, he will do so having brought off an extraordinary political achievement. – Telegraph.

That will be even more difficult. Here in Wales, plenty of party members, AMs and MPs cheered Ed’s victory – he polled a majority here. Hooray, they cry! Here’s the man who will take Labour back to its old-fashioned left-wing roots! And they may be right. But here’s something they forgot: When they were like that, they were massively electorally unsuccessful, getting thumped by the Tories time after time. – Wales Online.

If he gets it right, and quickly, the Labour Party will forget his slim margin of victory and the current unease that they may have chosen the wrong brother. If he gets it wrong, Ed Miliband will become another Michael Foot, a new-generation Kinnock, another Hague or, perhaps worst of all, a regenerated Iain Duncan Smith. – Herald Scotland.

The other brother

Much has been made of what the tumultuous past seven days tell us about the man who lost the crown.Principled, dignified and gracious, yes, but it also reinforces the impression that perhaps David Miliband lacks the political cunning and steel needed to reach the very top. – Mirror.

Lord Fired!

Lord Sugar, back in The Apprentice on Wednesday, revealed that the Prime Minister’s aides gave him the news just after the election. “After the election No 10 got in touch and told me that my services were no longer required,” he said. – Mirror.

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Saturday News Review

02/10/2010, 07:56:55 AM

Luring Lib Dems

Mr Miliband is playing a longer game. He criticised the Iraq war not to embarrass his brother but to send a powerful signal to Liberal Democrat voters. It appears to have worked. A poll of 1,023 people by the PoliticsHome website found that 47 per cent of Liberal Democrat supporters have more respect for Mr Miliband as a result of his remarks about Iraq (as do 48 per cent of Labour voters). He also talked up his credentials on civil liberties and promised to back the alternative vote in next May’s referendum. – The Independent

Lib Dems were also the only group to favour Ed Miliband over his brother David, with 34% of members thinking him the better leadership candidate. The survey will confirm fears in Lib Dem HQ that Ed Miliband represented the most serious threat to the party. By being sympathetic to Liberal views on civil liberties and foreign policy but against the spending cuts being implemented by the Conservatives, the younger Miliband brother can attract Lib Dem supporters alienated by the deficit reduction plan. – politics.co.uk

Strike Breaker

Labour’s new leader had kept quiet over next week’s scheduled walkout. But yesterday, in an effort to rid himself of his ‘Red Ed’ tag, he said Mr Cameron’s address should be broadcast in the “interests of impartiality and fairness”. Mr Miliband, voted leader on the back of union support, stopped short of condemning broadcasting union Bectu’s strike plan. He said: “Whatever the rights and wrongs of the dispute between Bectu and the BBC, they should not be blacking out the PM’s speech. “My speech was seen and heard on the BBC … so the Prime Minister’s should be.” – The Sun

Gerry Morrissey, the general secretary of Bectu, expressed the union’s “dissatisfaction” with Miliband’s intervention. “As a Labour party affiliate, Bectu places on record its dissatisfaction with Ed Miliband’s statement today. The leader’s intervention is not helpful and is dismissive of our actions as a responsible trade union which has been negotiating with the employer on this issue for three long months,” Morrissey said. Miliband this week sought to allay fears that he would reward affiliated trade unions for backing him in the leadership race in his first keynote speech since being elected Labour leader. – The Guardian (more…)

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Friday News Review

01/10/2010, 06:12:59 AM

Poll boost for Labour

Ed Miliband ends his first week as Labour leader with his party ahead of the Tories in a Guardian/ICM poll for the first time since Gordon Brown ducked the chance of holding an election in 2007. But the two-point lead is the result of a slump in Conservative support rather than any surge in Labour backing and the poll suggests voters are giving Miliband a wary rather than an enthusiastic welcome. The results will offer him a morale boost at the end of a tumultuous week but they also suggest that many Labour supporters are yet to see their new leader as a potential prime minister, and that his brother David might have attracted more support in the short term. – The Guardian

There’s a new ICM poll in the Guardian which once again is showing a very different picture of public opinion from that which we see in the News International daily poll by YouGov. The shares are with changes on last month CON 35 (-2): LAB 37 (nc): LD 18 (nc). The Lib Dems will be relieved that the pollster that came top in the general election polling accuracy table should have them at levels which are markedly different from the daily polls. Yes support is down since the 23.6% at the general election but the fall-off in support has apparently been halted. – Political Betting

Positioning Ed

In eschewing ideological politics for the politics of values, it is not so much JFK that Miliband is invoking but Robert Kennedy: yes, the younger brother. And the red thread that runs through the values argument is not the Socialist argument of Ralph Miliband, the Jewish immigrant Marxist father of the brothers, but rather a strain of radical Catholicism that also ran through Robert Kennedy’s late political framework. For a politician who will need to confront both the hegemony and destructive immorality of the world political-economic order as well the furious, defeated neo-liberal wing of his own Party, this is a clever stance, and it might just win the day for Ed Miliband. – The Huffington Post

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Renewal Eds are better than red Ed, says James O’Keefe

30/09/2010, 09:59:04 AM

There were two winners of the leadership contest: both the Eds. We are a meritocratic party and these two merited their respective victories – they ran the best campaigns and both achieved the best outcomes that their teams could reasonably have expected.

More importantly, they were also best in that they connected better by recognising the dual essences of what the party requires at this time: authenticity and renewal.

Authenticity because weaved into the DNA of both these campaigns was an understanding of the need, and a willingness, to push out of the constraints of the New Labour campaign doctrine that served us so well for the last decade: they were prepared to say things that the Daily Mail and the Murdia (Murdoch media) wouldn’t like but that the party has been subconsciously pleading for.

This was writ large in the new leader’s conference speech on Tuesday. (more…)

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Ed Miliband must keep alive the movement for change, says Ben Maloney

29/09/2010, 05:25:59 PM

Following Saturday’s result it’s vital that Ed Miliband gets to grips as quickly as possible with the scale of the challenge ahead of him.

And the most important thing he can do, if he’s serious about taking Labour forward, is recognise that if we’re going to pose a genuine challenge at the next election we need to rebuild the party from the grassroots up.

Based on my experience of the last four months, the answer for Ed is to embrace the hugely successful model that has already been implemented as a result of David Miliband’s movement for change. (more…)

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We must plan to do more for less, says Jonathan Todd

29/09/2010, 02:30:48 PM

“Facing a new world with new challenges, we need to think again about how we can best serve the people we seek to represent”.

So argues an email which Ed Miliband sent to Labour party members last night. As Ed acknowledged in his conference speech yesterday, one of this new world’s realities, even if we were to now have a Labour government, is the necessity of cuts; and one of the challenges, therefore, is to deliver more for less.

Deficit reduction, however, has simply brought into sharper focus an inescapable trend. An ageing society makes ever less viable established means of financing and delivering pensions, health and social care. Innovation will remain a precondition of improved public services beyond the correction of the structural deficit, which all major parties are committed to achieving over this parliament. Successful adaptation to our cold fiscal climate isn’t simply about muddling through coming years but of making sustainable for the long-term, given profound demographic shifts, vital public services. (more…)

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Conference sketch, by Siôn Simon

28/09/2010, 05:11:53 PM

A glance at Ed Milband reveals his origins. He is dark. Not just his glossy, black hair, but his eyes. And not just the brows or the glinting coals at the centre. The sockets themselves are subfusc.

His beard is light. In some ways he looks girlish. But his full, fleshy lips have a masculine sensuousness. And they are dark.

In short, he is Italian. His original name was Milibandini. His ties are thinner, too, than British ties. But this is also because he is from a New Generation. Only Mr Bradshaw’s ties are thinner than Sr Miliband’s.

Neil Kinnock does not look like this. He is red and freckled. Mr Kinnock is Sr Miliband’s friend. (more…)

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Kill Red Ed. Introduce Real Ed, says Jonathan Todd

28/09/2010, 01:30:11 PM

This afternoon Ed Miliband will introduce himself and reintroduce our party to a country unfamiliar with him and wary of us. The country needs to get to know Real Ed before Red Ed compounds the hostility towards us. This introduction and reintroduction should be made with the narrative which he intends to articulate at the next general election in mind. The first steps he takes as party leader could determine whether or not this journey ends in Downing Street.

A useful political narrative should have three parts: an explanation of where we are; a vision of where we want to get to; and a plan for realising the vision. David Cameron’s general election narrative is predictable. He will describe a country recovered from Labour excess; festooned with the tiny platoons of the Big Society and the ringing tills of prosperity. Rolling back the state, he will argue, took us this far and remains imperative to taking us further into Cameron’s sunny uplands. Hence his commitments to have people keep more of their own money through reduced taxation and his warnings, potentially echoed by almost all of the media, of Labour’s high taxes and big government.

Ed needs to do more than attack this logic. He also needs to promulgate his own contrasting narrative. For his story to have traction he has to confront various realities this afternoon: preparing our movement for the challenges ahead and communicating to the country that the party is prepared to take the steps necessary to meet these challenges.

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Kevin Meagher looks at the new leader’s in-tray

28/09/2010, 09:23:37 AM

THIS week, of all weeks, Ed Miliband will not find himself short of advice. Whatever his critics, myself among them, have said about his campaign, he has executed his strategy expertly. Quite simply, he intuitively understood the centre of gravity in the modern Labour party far better than any of the other candidates.

His appeal to the Guardian-reading, soft left, public-sector urbanites who comprise so much of the party’s grassroots, was perfectly pitched. These are principled, decent people who can be swayed by pragmatic arguments, as they were (initially) by Tony Blair; but ultimately they retain their original, earnestly held views. They saw many of their cherished beliefs battered and bruised during Labour’s years in office and were grateful to have a candidate to vote for in this contest who actually chimed with how they see the world.

The trouble is that their views are not necessarily the views of the broader electorate. Or, indeed, our lost Labour voters. Both Gordon Brown’s former pollster, David Muir and the Open Left team at Demos have made this point in recent days.

So the balance between idealism and hard-nosed electoral reality needs to be better calibrated. And our new leader will not have long to do so. He has to adapt to a fast-changing political landscape with firmness and quickness or risk being on the back foot from the off. To his right-wing media critics he is already “Red Ed” – a rollback to Labour’s Jurassic period. I am sure we can expect some subtle but firm rebranding in this afternoon’s speech.

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