As new MPs, his capacity to unite, inspire and make a deliberate shift from the New Labour dogmas which would risk us staying in opposition, convince us he is the Labour leader for our time.
The country has changed over the time Labour was in power, and the centre ground of politics is different too. Ed’s fresh approach will enable Labour to occupy that centre ground by addressing the concerns of the changed country we seek to govern. He can reach out and build an alliance of people who want a better life for themselves and want to see the ideas of fairness and freedom turned into genuine benefits them and to the country. His capacity to listen and learn means his leadership can be a decisive break with the recent past.
Of course we are all intensely proud of the achievements we achieved in Government, as is Ed, but the next election will be fought on the ideas for the future not the past.
The challenge in 1997 was to reassure people we were comfortable with the free market and we “got” globalisation. Nobody doubts that now.
The challenge today is to show that we will tackle unfairnesses and inefficiencies and convince the British people we can make banks and markets and free movement of labour work for them.
There is a real risk of resorting to repeating New Labour mantras. One fatal fault line in New Labour was the assumption that large swathes of the population had nowhere else to go. We failed to listen and took them for granted, so it should have come as no surprise that they finally did find other places to go or found it more comfortable to stay at home.
Wooing them back is as important as bringing more people into the Labour fold.
If we want voters to believe in Labour that will mean listening to them. That means for those families worried about the costs of going to university that there will be a fair and equitable graduate tax rather than sticking with tuition fees. That means campaigning for a decent day’s pay for a decent day’s work in the form of a Living Wage. That means arguing for greater security for working people rather than defending a flexible labour market which means easy hire and fire. It means admitting people turned away from us when they thought we were too casual about individual freedoms, like trying to introduce ID cards. And it means arguing the deficit needs to be tackled not only fairly but also with an eye to the kind of country and economy we want create.
Under Ed’s leadership we will be able to bring together all the different arms of the party that we as a group of parliamentarians represent and ensure that we are a unified force that can win back power. His leadership will put the years of factionalism behind us.
It is now clear that all candidates for the leadership claim the mantle of change. The difference here is that Ed understands the scale of change required. He is demonstrating what that change should look like, in the modernising of our policies to adapt to the new circumstances, in his analysis of who left us and why, and in his inspirational campaigning style which is motivating thousands of people to work for his victory and the victory of the party.
We need to take the fight to this coalition and challenge their policies which will leave Britain a less fair and less prosperous country. We need to expose this and we need to offer people a real alternative. Ed is that alternative.
“genuine benefits them” “achievements we achieved” “unfairnesses” “want voters want” “rather defending” “we want create” Really??
Disappointing, non specific and what a badly written endorsement that does not explain any detailed reason to support Ed other than he looks “fresh.” It all sounds very 1980s to me… sorry but I was there and don’t want to go back and this tone of politics will leave Labour in opposition for another 10 years.
Ten years, your of course joking, the Tories will be looking at another four terms in power before people will even look at Labour. The talk now is about hung governments, I think it highly unlikely, the Tories should walk the next election as new Labour tries it best to reclaim the lost Tory voters, forgetting the working class
I agree with Patrick.
As somebody who is seriously considering giving Ed my second preference, I am no closer to doing so after reading this endorsement.
Neither am I particularly convinced by Ed’s rhetoric of change, I think he’s exaggerating his differences with the previous government, and of course who *wouldn’t* want to portray themselves as the change candidate?
All I’m hearing from the Ed Miliband camp is cliche after cliche. “We have to change”, “listen to the voters”, “modernise our policies” etc. What I don’t hear is “real policy”. Frankly (my dear) I’m sick and tired of candidates blaming past policies and PMs for our loss in support. They are eager to blame 5m lost voters on “10p tax” or “Iraq” but are notably silent on increased support on “minimum wage”, “massively improved standards in Education and Health”, “much improved standard of living” etc. etc. On balance, shouldn’t we be in positive support for what Labour has achieved since 1997? No person or government is perfect. We can get some things wrong but if we get most things right I think we can hold our heads up and say “we did good”. I believe that Labour has been a definitely positive force for good both domestically and abroad. Why, then, have we lost so many voters? Sadly, too many leadership candidates want to ascribe this loss to ‘policy failure’ and the ‘easiest’ one is, of course, ‘Iraq’. Diane Abbott attributes Blair’s decision to wage war on Saddam as her main reason for Labour’s loss of support and in this particular she may well be correct – but for the wrong reason. Waging war on another country is rarely going to be a popular decision in a democratic society (one exception might be found in the aftermath of 9/11) but occassionally this is necessary. If you believe that Blair (along with many other national leaders) was right to invade Iraq you should have the guts to stand up and say so. If you believe he behaved illegally and immorally you should have resigned from government (and perhaps joined the decidedly aggressive ‘Stop the War’ peaceful demonstrators). Of course, the fact that most of the media (including the BBC) chose to dwell on the ‘shoe-throwing’ antics of a minority of hooligans at Tony Blair’s Dublin book promotion (the proceeds of which go to British servicemen) and ignore in their reports the many hundreds of people queuing in the rain in support of the former Prime Minister says more about the media than past policy.
If I was brain-dead and believed what was reported in the media I would be a Diane Abbott supporter. Afterall, she has used the media to attack every aspect of Labour governance since ’97. Andrew Neil’s sofa at the BBC has become her ‘second home’!
My suggestion is that the main reason for Labour’s voter loss over the last 10 years is the influence of the media (both Print and TV) rather than policy. For example, despite Andy Burnham’s assertion (as CMS Minister) that the BBC is ‘unbiased’ records show that it was (and remains) anti-Labour in all its news output (it could, for example, have reported Tony Blair’s book signing in Dublin as a ‘triumph of Irish peacekeeping’ over sectarian divisions. It could have demoted the antisocial actions of a few extremists to a footnote in an otherwise positive event, but ,of course, it concentrated on the unrepresentative minority at the expense of the vast majority – how typical of our Press and TV!).
Personally, I will vote for the candidate who has the guts to praise both Blair and Brown (who has been poorly treated) and the ability to ‘fight the media’ and ‘educate the voters’.