It might be that Ed Miliband secretly enjoys the ‘Red Ed’ tag. It’s the cool nickname he never had at school, when the best he could manage was ‘Ted’. ‘Red Ted’ sounds like a character on CBeebies. Whatever his private delight at the coolness of ‘Red Ed’, the sensible lobe of his not-inconsiderable brain knows that it’s a tag he needs to ditch fast. He may have showed a little leftist ankle to win the leadership election, but he knows he can only win the next general election from the centre ground, as the leader of a mainstream social democratic party, best friends with Modernity and her sister Prudence.
Ed has made some bold moves since his shock victory: neutering Nick Brown; a clever conference speech recognising the need to learn from the past but not to live in it; and not turning up at the TUC rally. He’s proving that he’s his own man, not the Brownites’, and not the unions’. Perhaps the smartest move was installing Alan Johnson as shadow chancellor. Ed’s insight is that in opposition the job should go to a connector, a communicator, someone who can get a memorable line up in the media. These were Gordon Brown’s strengths from 1992 onwards, until the Dementors caught up with him in the second term. Johnson is the best man for the non-job of shadow chancellor – and, importantly, unlike Ed Balls (or probably Yvette Cooper), doesn’t want to be leader or prime minister.
The spending review (Tory distaste for comprehensives means they can’t even use the term to describe a spending review) was Labour’s great opportunity. It wasn’t exactly lost, but it wasn’t exactly grasped with both hands either. Labour needed to frame the debate. The Tories have successfully embedded the idea that the deficit was Labour’s fault because we pissed the money up the wall on race equality quangos, featherbedding for public sector workers and Sky subscriptions for asylum seekers. Labour must remind people that the money was spent preventing banks from collapsing, ATMs closing, and wages going unpaid. It was spent ensuring that there was no run on the banks, no panic buying at supermarkets and petrol stations, no social chaos. We are failing to win that argument.
The second fluffed opportunity was to lay out a serious alternative to the Tory cuts. ‘Too far and too fast’ has some resonance. ‘A reckless gamble’ was the chosen soundbite. The thing about gambles is that sometimes they pay off. Instead, Labour needed an alternative plan. Labour in government had its own efficiency drives, its own bonfire of the quangos, and its own hit list of civil service jobs for the chop. Johnson made little of these in his speech. We needed a list of things we would cut, and a list of things we would protect. Labour’s credibility must be built on our deficit reduction plan.
Let’s be honest: there was terrible profligacy and waste under Labour. John Prescott’s department spent thousands bringing a life-sized replica of the slave ship Amistad to Britain. The NHS HQ in Leeds has its own swimming pool. The National School of Government is run like a country house hotel for civil servants. All of this, plus much, much else, continued on Labour’s watch, and we should have done more to stop it.
Under Brown, the opportunities for serious reform of the welfare system were lost through inertia and reluctance to let modernisers such as James Purnell and Caroline Flint pursue change. That meant that the Tories could play the reform card in the spending review, and Johnson was left with little more than good one-liners. Aneuran Bevan and William Beveridge would be spinning in their graves if they saw the great failure of the welfare state: vast estates with a majority living all their lives on benefits. The welfare state was designed to ensure that if the market failed to supply work and welfare then the state would step in. It wasn’t designed to turn the working classes into the claimant classes.
Labour must be an alternative government, not the leadership of a protest movement. Going on demonstrations is good for body and soul. It’s the Guardianista’s version of going to the gym. You can pop to Waitrose on the way home. It does nothing to help the poorest souls who will suffer disproportionately from the Tory government’s cuts, nor the squeezed middle of society. They don’t need our solidarity, they need us to get our act together and get back into government.
Drop the silly “Guardianista” jibe and realise that New Labour lost millions of liberals by its wayward authoritarianism, triangulation and misguided foreign interventions. Sure, Labour must attract the middle ground. The problem is that New Labour saw the middle ground as being essentially “Daily Mailista.” Mailistas will never vote Labour – they regard attempts to suck up to them as weakness. Labour must recover the liberal middle ground and recognise where its true friends (and enemies) lie.
Labour must be the what? alternative, your joking. Each time Miliband opens his mouth you know what he is going to say before his Brain connects, we will back the Tories on welfare reform after all we have to pull the country out of recession and the banking crises. To allow this party to use the name Labour is an insult these days.
I would like to comment on the two opportunities which the Progressive mentions. I disagree that the Tories have embedded the idea that the deficit was Labour’s fault, because according to a recent Populus/Time poll asked to rank in order the causes of Britain’s record public deficit, voters blame the UK banks, then the American banks followed by the Bank of England and the global recession. Gordon Brown came in fifth. But Labour could do more in refuting the Tory lies as the some of the public are easily deceived by propaganda. The deficit rose not because spending increased, but because taxation has been reduced due to reduced consumer spending and rising unemployment. Once the economy improves and more people become employed the deficit will fall. However, I agree with the second statement that the Tory gamble could pay off. There is a worrying scenario. If this happens the Tories and Liberal Democrats will take credit for reducing the deficit and the Tories could give tax cuts to bribe the electorate giving the lion’s share of tax cuts to the rich which is what Tories come into politics for. It could make the Tories and the Liberal democrats more popular and it could give the Tories a second term without the help of the Liberal Democrats. The Tories would then be able to cut more public services to pay for more tax cuts. Therefore Labour does need to have an alternative plan. Labour has set up a website which members have contributed to suggesting alternatives to Tory cuts, so it is up to Ed Miliband and the rest of the shadow cabinet to shout out from the roof tops what Labour’s alternative is.
It’s very easy to say we need to put forward an alternative but then articles like this quickly fall into offering pretty much the same stuff and trot out Daily Mail examples with no substance or truth in them. For example, the National School of Government runs a lot of courses out of a delapitated office near Victoria Station and the site in Sunningdale is managed and run by a PFI contractor. Changing this will cost a lot of money, cost jobs and leave a gap in our ability to train staff across the public sector in a more efficient, centralised, consistent way whilst controlling departments training and development costs. The NSG would be back at the heart of delivering a core development programme across the public sector instead of overpaid consultants and top brass (Spivs)hiving off cash to attend jollies and social under the guise of calling this training. What the country needs is an intelligent, informed discussion about why we need universal services and benefits; an efficient and fair tax system that morally challenges tax dogers with the same aggression and rigour that politicians talk about tackling benefit cheats, etc. Rather than talk about the NSG talk about the 1 million unanswered letters in HMRC and how staff there and in benefits offices have strict time limits on how long they can help somoen under “lean” management procedures. What Bevin, Bevan, Beveridge, etc all knew was that good politics come from putting people at the centre of what you’re doing – that connection is what we lost. As every cut to jobs and services bites people ask what next and why me. Our strap line should be along the lines of “If we have no alternative how much worse would it get?” Oh and a few more spokespeople like Johnson who have actually had a real job and talked to real people about something other than politics in the last twenty years may also help.