Ed Miliband’s vision for a ‘new economy’ represents a renewed purpose for Labour

It has been over a week since Ed Miliband delivered his keynote to the Progress Annual Conference 2012. Although my schedule pushed the completion of this article back, the time passed actually allowed me to deliberate on and confirm my thoughts about that speech as they were conceived on the day – that it was our leader’s best to date.

Why? One reason is that Ed is undoubtedly transitioning into a comfortable manner. The Progress keynote was calm and assertive, clear and compelling, delivered with impressive effect. But the other reason, most importantly, is the decisive factor which is now beginning to allow Ed to be comfortable and assert with such distinction. It is the realisation of a vision.

After the 2010 general election defeat, Labour wandered the wilderness. After 13 years of hugely successful government, the hangover came, and the unfamiliar benches of opposition beckoned. It was this unfamiliarity which inevitably caused us to wander, caused us to reflect on our defeat, and, vitally, caused us to ask ourselves how we get back to the side of the House we need to be. Much to our credit as a party, we didn’t make attempts to fly before we could walk. We took time, enough and not too much, most notably through Refounding Labour. With critics and commentators asking the Labour opposition what its alternatives to the coalition’s policies would be, it was natural not to have many answers. Genuine, workable, and worthwhile policies don’t just appear from nowhere. And why had we not yet found alternative policies? Because we had not yet found ourselves.

Besides our core Labour values, principles of justice and fairness carried within us all whichever point in our history we may be, we had not yet constructed a new vision for Britain in which they could fit. Not until Ed’s speech last week, however. Pivotal in our outlook and direction, the vision of a ‘new economy’ is the accumulation of our collective voice of the past 18 months. Pivotal because it serves as an exit from the wilderness and as a path back to power, imperatively in a timescale worlds away from the wilderness the Conservative party experienced in the many years after 1997. Essentially, as Ed himself set out, it is the ‘challenge of orthodox views of the way our economy works’. The economy which still exploits people, the economy which failed so greatly four years ago, the economy which now means the many, rather than the few actually responsible for its failure, have to pay the price and pick up the pieces. It is this unjust current system that should act as the inspiration to change and challenge, to develop a vision of something different, and reconnect with the people. It is the ambition to reform such a system, to provide an alternative to it and the current government which seeks to see its continuity, which can renew our purpose as a party.

Although still in its infancy, such a vision of a new economy is vital. Because not only does it renew our purpose, it lays the foundations in which the policy answers are built. In finding ourselves, we can begin to find the policies. But in addition to policy, vision also delivers the crucial third point of the golden triangle of electability: trust. ‘In a vision of a country where the economy works for all those in it, not just the top, people will begin to listen to us once again,’ Ed told Progress annual conference. ‘Let us show them that we are worthy of their trust’. This is crucial, undeniably and obviously in light of the trust all mainstream parties have lost in recent years. A vision of a new economy will strikingly illustrate us as different, as Ed aptly described it, the way in which we ‘don’t just look like the exiled establishment waiting to get another turn of the wheel’. Our renewed purpose can help represent ourselves to be different in different times, to rid the blameless doorstep cliche that as a political party ‘we’re all the same’.

Ultimately, a ‘new economy’ is a grand vision that says something different. A modernised purpose derived from Labour values, rebuilding Labour as the party of the people. Success in polls is proving that Labour is getting things right, but the only poll which matters is that of the general election in 2015. There is no shying away from the fact we are not totally there yet, but our vision and purpose can take us there, through meaningful policy and regained trust. With vision in place, the narrative of Ed Miliband’s Labour party becoming the next government of Britain has reached a whole new level of possibility indeed.