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Labour HQ is the place where political narratives go to die

15/10/2014, 10:03:50 AM

by Alexander Shea

Last month’s Conference represented a nadir for Ed Miliband’s Labour party. It was a graveyard of narrative, an abandonment of the political.

Labour relapsed into ‘itemised politics’, presenting a praiseworthy plan for the protection of the NHS yet failing to encompass it within a wider coherent and compelling narrative of what is fundamentally wrong with this country and how Labour proposes to put it right.

As the shock of the Heywood and Middleton by-election has shown, an electoral strategy comprised of a single-issue focus on the NHS is not going to cut the mustard. Narrow, itemised politics is not the way forward. To win in 2015, Labour needs to think big.

Establishing a clear and firm policy line on the NHS was necessary. As polls have shown it is the most important issue in the upcoming election to 34% of voters, making it the leading issue for 2015.

But it is precisely in these polling figures that the sheer lack of ambition or political message that Labour conveyed by making the NHS its marquee policy, is able to be sensed. It smacked of a 35 percent strategy: a timid desire to play it safe politically- to score on ‘open goal’ policy issues such as the NHS- in the knowledge that due to an electoral quirk, Labour will win a majority in the next Parliament if it breaks the 35 percent threshold. What better way to implement such a 35 percent strategy than by banking on an issue that 35 percent of the electorate prioritise.

Pursuing such a timid approach, however, is the height of folly. John Prescott is right. Rather than scoring an ‘open goal’ on the NHS, by pursuing itemized politics Labour has sacrificed the potential for a broader political message, and consequently scored a massive own goal.

They presented David Cameron with a gilt-edged opportunity at his party conference in Birmingham. At a time when Cameron should have been on the back foot over Brooks Newmark’s sexting and Mark Reckless’ defection to UKIP, Labour effectively presented Cameron with the opportunity to use his party conference speech as a platform from which to project a narrative of British politics, that of ‘economism’ in which the twin gods of economic growth and welfare cuts are reified at the expense of humanistic politics, the latter focusing not on objective economic data but the subjective experience of living in austerity Britain: the cost of living crisis, the bedroom tax, childcare allowance and so on.

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If Labour were credible on the deficit, Cameron’s speech would have been a disaster

02/10/2014, 11:53:39 AM

by Atul Hatwal

Lucky David Cameron.

Lucky, because the global economic upturn has dealt him a kind hand on the economy, just as the crash dealt Labour a dud.

Lucky, because the lack of serious alternatives within the parliamentary Conservative party has assured his tenure as leader, no matter how jittery or demented his backbenchers have become (imagine how different the situation would have been had there been a Heseltine or Portillo lurking in the Commons’ corridors instead of Adam Afriye.)

And, most of all, lucky because David Cameron faces Ed Miliband’s Labour party.

A party so denuded of economic credibility that the Tories can increase the deficit by £75bn, miss all of their fiscal targets, and still maintain a double digit poll lead over Labour, on who is most trusted to manage the economy.

It’s why David Cameron could make the speech he did yesterday. A speech offering an unfunded £7bn+ tax cut just 48 hours after George Osborne talked up the need for an extra £25bn in cuts.

We have passed through the looking glass and entered a world of Wonderland economics: where tax cuts are all self-funding and public spending cuts have no consequence.

If Labour had done what it needed to four years ago; demonstrated that it understood the public’s anxieties over spending with the last Labour government, and moved to win back public trust, then David Cameron would now be in serious trouble.

The public would be listening as Labour spokespeople point out the political hypocrisy and economic insanity at the heart of David Cameron’s speech.

Years of Tory message discipline on the need for fiscal rectitude would be lying in ruins. Mistrust of the Tories on public spending would be taking off in the polls.

But none of that is happening.

Instead, as far as the public is concerned, Labour remains on mute. Whatever the party says on the economy is tuned out because of the deeply held belief that however bad the Tories are – and there’s lots of evidence that the public have little faith or confidence in Cameron and Osborne’s economic judgement – Labour will be worse.

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Conference diary

24/09/2014, 04:09:45 PM

How big has the Labour conference been this year? With the party looking to form a government next May this was the last chance for the usual retinue of lobbyists and influence peddlers to ply their trade to shadow ministers who just might be making actual decisions in a few months’ time.

Certainly the ring of steel surrounding the conference centre here in Manchester seemed smaller than in recent years and the security was noticeably less oppressive.

But how do you measure the size of a conference and whether you’re attracting the movers and shakers? Square footage of steel fencing? Numbers queuing at the Midland Hotel bar?

“Young women” says a journalist at one of the better newspapers. “That’s how you tell if you’re winning, how many young women are attending.”
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Metaphor of the week: Labour’s Shadow Transport Secretary, Mary Creagh, describing buses as a “Cinderella service”. But didn’t Cinders prefer to travel by coach and horse?

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Conference hall Kremlinology. Former Countryfile presenter, Miriam O’Reilly, who successfully sued the BBC over ageism, was in action on Tuesday, chairing a session of conference.

A favourite of Harriet Harman, O’Reilly was shortlisted for the Heywood and Middleton by-election, despite having no obvious connection to the area. This led to a peasants’ revolt against and an effort to back eventual winner Liz McInnes.

But O’Reilly is nothing if not tenacious and her appearance on the platform guarantees we haven’t seen the last of her.

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One of the undoubted benefits of holding political conferences in cities is the range of pubs and restaurants available.

One of the downsides is that delegates disperse to the four winds leaving many evening fringe events and the main conference hotel bars half empty – until they return in the wee small hours because its the only place left open.

Welcome competition this year came from a food and drink festival in St Peter’s Square which became a favourite of conference-goers.

And the top tipple for a party once committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament and slashing defence spending? ’13 Guns.’
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Who says Labour can’t identify any cuts. Over at the New Statesman, the enterprising Harry Lambert has calculated that frontbench speeches were on average just 1,200 words long, with rumours of a word count to corral any windy shadow ministers.

Tough on boilerplate rhetoric, tough on the cause of boilerplate rhetoric? We approve.

Posted in Inside | 6 Comments »

Milibelievers were thin on the ground at Labour conference

24/09/2014, 02:54:20 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Throughout Ed Miliband’s leadership there have been those at Labour Party conference prepared to mock and criticise him. There have also been Milibelivers. In between these pessimists and optimists have been pragmatists, seeing both positives and weaknesses in Miliband, seeking to accentuate the former and minimise the latter.

Milibelivers felt thin on the ground this week. I made a point of asking everyone I spoke to how they assessed the mood. “Flat,” was the usual response. After Miliband’s speech, I also enquired what they thought of it. The elderly delegate from a Labour constituency in the north east of England who described it as “the icing on the cake of his week” was the exception in speaking wholly warmly about it.

The dearth of Milibelivers had the effect that pragmatists felt less conference peer pressure to align themselves with the optimists and more to mirror the concerns of the pessimists. We entered a spiral of negativity. The conference vibe was much like twitter where the cheerleading tweets of MPs during Miliband’s speech were drowned out by the mirth of others.

The grounds for optimism cited by elected representatives, however, were not always without foundation. One told me of a Labour business breakfast attended by many more businesses and senior business people than in previous years. Public affairs agencies informed me that they were bringing more clients to conference than in recent years and clients were keener to attend.

Business is preparing for Labour government. They are right to do so. After Douglas Carswell’s defection to UKIP, presuming he succeeds in retaining his seat in the upcoming by election, the idea that UKIP will poll something in the order of 10 per cent in 2015 seems plausible. While an effective ground game is likely to secure the Liberal Democrats many more MPs than UKIP, probably somewhere between 30 and 40, their national polling has been on the floor for so long that it also seems plausible that they might poll somewhere in the same 10 per cent region. Both the persistence of UKIP and the non-recovery of the Liberal Democrats favour Labour over the Conservatives. As do the parliamentary boundaries. As does the incomplete nature of David Cameron’s half-baked detoxification of his party.

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Ed’s speech needed to change the political weather. It didn’t

24/09/2014, 12:53:19 PM

by Rob Marchant

23 September, 2014: the culmination of four years as leader. Milliband’s last major pitch to lead the country, for this parliament at least.

From now, time can only tell whether it has been the gateway to a whole new vista of politics for Miliband and the keys to No. 10; an attempt to convince his party that he would be still the best option after a narrow defeat; or some kind of a swansong.

Now, the central message of the speech is one which resonates – with the Tories, you’re on your own. The many not the few. We all believe in that, it’s what makes us Labour. And Miliband rightly points up the transparent makeover that David Cameron made of his party, in order to get elected, only to be swiftly ditched shortly thereafter. Good attack lines.

The question is, of course, with eight months to a general election, whether we are perceived as offering a credible, viable alternative. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Presentationally, the decision to offer a ten-year plan, while admirably long-term thinking, seems a tactical error (at least we might thank our lucky stars it was not a five-year plan, although the echo of Chairman Mao was still enough to please the headline-writers).

And let’s be honest: after four years, the “I met this guy” format is starting to look a little tired. As the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow put it: “if I were David Cameron’s speechwriter, I would already be working up a passage for Cameron’s conference speech about how Labour policy is now being decided…by whichever stranger Miliband happens to meet in his local park.”

But these are quibbles. It is the meat we need to evaluate.

To start with, it was telling that the centerpiece of the speech is a conversation with a former Lib Dem voter. Worryingly, whether or not we believe in the existence of the fabled “35% strategy” of attracting former Lib Dem voters, we certainly still seem to be aiming for the Lib-Dems-plus-a-few-other-odds-and-sods strategy, a patchwork quilt of support from different interest groups.

And we can see it in the speech – there is a nod to practically everyone. While some of this is normal in a conference speech, here it veered towards the extreme: the gay vote, pro-Europe liberals, public service workers, boxes were being ticked for parcels of leftish voters in every other sentence. To ensure we don’t lose either Muslim or Jewish voters, dammit, the man is even going to bring peace between Israel and Palestine.

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The lessons for Labour from Bill de Blasio’s New York success are limited

24/09/2014, 07:00:50 AM

by Rob Philpot

New York mayor Bill de Blasio is not a man for understatement. Since taking office in January, he’s described everything from his own election to the opening of a new park in Brooklyn as ‘transcendent’. Alongside ‘historic’, it’s a term he has used over 80 times in the last nine months to describe the changes he is bringing to the city.

No doubt he’ll apply one of his two favourite accolades to his address to the Labour party conference in Manchester today. As the party’s guest international speaker, he is, after all, following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and Hamid Karzai.

But Labour should avoid getting too carried away by de Blasio’s lofty rhetoric. Take that ‘transcendent’ election last year. De Blasio’s populist campaign, with its focus on inequality, promise to govern on behalf of the ’99 per cent’ and pledge to raise taxes on the very rich, certainly appeared to ‘break every rule in the New Labour playbook’, as Diane Abbott crowed the day after the Democrats beat the Republicans by a near-50 point margin.

However, de Blasio didn’t exactly storm a citadel of conservatism.

New York is a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one, which awarded Barack Obama 81 per cent of its votes when he ran for re-election in 2012, and which no Republican presidential candidate has carried since Calvin Coolidge in 1924. In his piece trumpeting the election as proof that ‘a different kind of progressive politics can capture the imagination of a public ground down by economic crisis’, Ed Miliband’s strategy adviser, Stewart Wood, admitted that ‘New York City is not the UK, and a mayoral race is not the same as a British general election’. Slightly more fundamentally, New York can’t even be said to be the US; its politics are representative of virtually nowhere else.

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Spotted at conference: Who is the mystery replacement leader?

23/09/2014, 11:45:27 AM

We knew times were tough for Ed, but does the party machine know something we don’t? Just who is the replacement leader?

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What we need to hear from Ed

23/09/2014, 11:13:15 AM

by Kevin Meagher

Given the tumultuous events in Scotland, Ed Miliband can be forgiven if he’s already ripped-up several drafts of his leader’s speech as he still works out how to respond. But putting that to one side, what is today about? What do we need to hear from Ed and what should he be looking to get out of his annual address to his party?

Ed needs to galvanise the Labour tribe. After all, that is technically why we are all here this week. Yet there’s a flat feeling to this conference. While many express cautious optimism that Labour will win next May, the next conversation comes with predictions of electoral doom, as Lib Dem floaters return home and Cameron rallies. Ed needs to convey, if not vision, then optimism about next year and transmit a sense of confidence that his troops can buy into.

He needs to transcend the party and speak to the electorate at large. This is now the real purpose of a leader’s conference speech. For one day a year, the spotlight falls on the Labour leader, who is given an opportunity to try and set the political agenda, and, even more importantly, show us what kind of person he is. Dog breeders would call it temperament. And while you can train yourself to recite a speech without notes, (a skill that’s frankly lost on a television audience) being likeable and spontaneous is a tad more difficult. But that’s what most non-committed voters will be looking for. This conference, the last before the general election, is, essentially, a job interview for becoming prime minister. So no pressure then.

Show Labour gets the need for further devolution. Calling for a constitutional convention – hitherto Labour’s response to the Scottish devolution result and demands for similar moves for England – is all very well, but it lacks urgency. Ed needs to use his speech to set out the principles that will inform his approach in coming months. Positioning Labour against the ridiculous idea of an English parliament is a start, but Ed needs to go further today and set out the conceptual framework for how power is devolved in England. If he doesn’t, he risks letting Cameron frame the agenda in his conference speech. So is it regions, city regions, strengthened local government or something else?

Do something to address the issue around leadership and economic credibility. Although the party maintains a steady opinion poll lead, the deficits the party continues to run on leadership and economic credibility makes many nervous that the headline poll lead will hold water the closer we get to next May. Let’s be clear: this is a legacy that anyone leading the Labour party would face, but it is, ultimately, Ed Miliband’s problem to fix. And, to put it bluntly, nowhere near enough has been done over the last four years. No-one in their heart of hearts will truly believe the party is set to win next year until these gaps narrow. (more…)

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What Ed must do in his speech: Respond to EVEL

22/09/2014, 06:30:10 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Quebec came close to voting for independence in the 1990s. It was then granted more powers and support for independence declined. It is to be hoped that Scotland follows the same trajectory. But it should be noted that Canada and Quebec achieved this in the much more economically benign era of the 1990s. When economies are growing and wages are rising, people display less of a tendency to be seduced by the false consolations of nationalism. Therefore, when Ed Balls in his conference speech moved quickly from English votes on English laws (EVEL) to the inequities of zero hour contracts, he was not talking about unrelated issues. But he was talking about distinct issues.

The core insight of Ed Miliband that we need an economy that better works for the broad mass of the population is correct. And while such an economy would diminish the charms of both UK breakup and UKIP, it does not adequately meet the challenge posed by proponents of EVEL. Without going further to address the constitutional implications raised by “the vow” made to the Scottish people and the ways in which EVEL would meet these implications by creating new problems, Miliband risks seeming to be a politician avoiding a simple solution (EVEL) simply because it doesn’t suit his narrow interests. He shouldn’t want to be such a politician and must ensure that he is not in his speech tomorrow.

Jonathan Todd is Deputy Editor of Labour Uncut

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Uncut Review: Ed Balls’ speech

22/09/2014, 05:00:28 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Soon after Ed Balls finished speaking to conference, Hopi Sen restated to a Policy Network fringe the core thesis of Into the Black Labour, which he co-authored: social justice and fiscal conservatism are complements. Sen praised the robustness of the fiscal rules that Balls proposes for a Labour government. But feels the party has not gone as far in explaining the practical steps that would be necessary to satisfy these rules. Balls’ speech did not take us greatly forward on this front.

The publication made by Uncut at conference last year, identifying an additional £34bn of public sector savings that might be made and reallocated to Labour priorities, remains one of the most substantive efforts made to explain how Labour might make the sums add up. Politicians like to talk of tough decisions but are often not as quick to make them. Uncut cast some light on how this might be done.

At the Policy Network fringe, Liz Kendall explained that typical doorstep questions are: What are you going to do? How are you going to be able to afford that? The point of the Uncut publication was to answer these explains, convincingly explaining how funds could be found to fund a Labour alternative. If there has been a reluctance to go as far as Uncut did, it is probably explained by Sen lamenting that additional fiscal consolidation “gets very ugly very quickly”.

Lack of engagement with these issues will not, however, make them any prettier. They are not wines that will mature but vinegars that will go off. Kendall reminded Policy Network that the OBR consider the ageing of society to be the biggest threat to fiscal sustainability. The ageing of society isn’t about to stop. The only thing that might change is our preparedness for it. Which requires honestly facing up to the issues sooner rather than later, even if this does quickly take us into ugly territory.

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