The one thing a Labour leader never lacks is advice. It comes in by the shovel-load, like manure. It comes in casual encounters, formal meetings, letters written in green ink, pompous ‘open letters’, coded warnings and articles in the press.
On the road to Liverpool Ed Miliband is drowning in advice. Floating at the top is The Purple Book, coming from shadow cabinet and former cabinet colleagues, and those who wish him well. Its central theme is that Labour should win power in order to give it away. It provides both a philosophical approach, and some engaging policy ideas (abolishing the CLG, anyone?) which add to the texture of Labour’s debates.
There’s also Tangled Up in Blue, a book by 26-year-old writer Rowenna Davies about the development of the ‘Blue Labour’ philosophy. It’s being serialised in the Guardian tomorrow. It promises to be an important landmark in Labour thinking. It’s based on in-depth interviews with all of the people you might expect, and sets out for the first time an embryonic ‘Milibandism’ that is distinctively Ed’s. To the growing pile of advice, I could add intelligent contributions from Graham Cooke at the IPPR, and Hopi Sen writing for Renewal.
The trick for Ed is of course to ignore all of it. No leader can lead as a cipher for others. I went to see Steve Richards last night, in the slightly-disorientating environment of the Queen’s Tennis Club in Baron’s Court, give his entertaining political spiel to an audience of high-rate-of-tax-paying, tennis-playing, Bentley-driving folk. He made the important point that a leader must speak with an authentic voice: Wilson and Thatcher did; Brown had forgotten how to. He reminded his (approving) audience that Thatcher arrived in 1978-9 politically fully-formed. She was authentically a free-market anti-union English nationalist, and voters with skilled manual jobs, living in council houses, in towns and suburbs south of Watford, loved it.
So Ed must develop his own voice. The focus will be on the speech on Tuesday, which will concentrate on the need to tackle unaccountable concentrations of power, be they in media conglomerates, international banks, mass retailers, or energy companies. It’s a rich theme. People who feel out-of-control about their own streets and neigbourhoods, their own jobs and firms, and their family’s prosperity, want a sense that swirling market forces can be tamed. The big events of the summer – the looting and arson, the demise of the News of the World, the revolutions in the Middle East and north Africa – are hard to interpret through a single analytical lens. Even the Marxists are struggling to link kids in Battersea stealing trainers from Foot Locker with the courage of crowds in Bahrain, Yemen and Libya. Yet each in its way speaks of a past which is dead or dying, and a future as yet to be born. It was like this in the late 1970s, and again in 1989 when the wall came down.
In such times of flux, we need leaders confident in their own values and convictions. A speech can project such confidence. It can connect with people’s fears and aspirations. That’s Ed’s challenge on Tuesday; he will be judged on his performance, and as usual some will say he passed, and some will say he failed the test. You can confidently predict now who will fall into each camp.
The bigger challenge for Labour is not about what happens in Liverpool. The big question is how Labour responds to the global economic crisis that is about to batter us. I forget which party conference was overshadowed by Bill Clinton unhelpfully ordering bombing raids in the middle, and shamefully I can’t even remember who he was bombing. But it will seem as the buzzing of a fly compared to what might befall us this week. It is probable that as we gather in Liverpool, our conference is rocked off course by meltdown and panic. The head of the IMF Christine Lagarde says we are entering a ‘dangerous place’, and World Bank president Robert Zoellick says we are in a ‘danger zone’. People are seeing their pension pots and ISAs melting away. As I write, the FTSE, Dow Jones, Nasdaq and other main indexes are jumping up and down like Mexican beans.
A debate next week about whether to rename local government committees might seem a little out of touch.
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Paul Richards is a former special adviser and writes a weekly column for Progress, Paul’s week in politics
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