Glasgow, Brighton and Manchester have all seen the political whirlwind that is the British party conference season travel through their respective city centres in the past three weeks. Now that the banners have been taken down, the last of the thin wine and stale beer poured away, and the remaining dazed delegates returned home, the detailed analysis can start in earnest. Not that every speech, every line, every nuance, every utterance, every boozy boast has not already been scrutinised by a voracious press pack. The perennial dilemma for all party conferences is that, while they are the flagship event for any political party, their influence and projection seemingly diminishes each year. The danger is that they become a cocoon for the mere fraction of the population that can be classified as the ‘political obsessive’ and that for all the huff, the puff, the theatrics and the drama, the three parties barely speak beyond the conference hall – let alone to the nation.
However, the scale, depth and breadth of Ed Milband’s address to the party faithful deserves to be taken seriously and – for its sheer ambition – admired. There is a Miliband emerging that is very much his own man; he feels neither beholden to the weight of the New Labour past or shackled in his vision for Labour that he is very much laying out. His speech, a rhetorical tour-de-force, has established himself as a powerful political orator – a talent not necessarily first ascribed to a wide-eyed Miliband of 2010. It was, though, avowedly of the left. Correctly, or not, he believes that the British public will make the journey with him. When he first arrived in sunny Brighton for conference, addressing a small open-air rally the Labour leader was quizzed as to when he was bringing socialism back: ‘But that is what we are doing, sir,’ Miliband replied. The nation now has a fuller idea of what Miliband-led Labour government would actually do.
While the Labour leader may have only used the ‘s’ word to a small gathering it now courses through his narrative as Labour leader. Talk of predators and ‘predistribution’ was laughed off the political stage two years ago but at their intellectual heart lies Ed Miliband’s personal politics. He wants a better market and has put his faith in the intervention of the state, which is a fond and comforting thought for many within the Labour party. He will force developers who hoard land to ‘use it or lose it’, in an astonishing political and actual landgrab. The consequences of this particular idea have been less well teased-out – could companies, yet fear CPO and hesitate to purchase land, thus exacerbating the nation’s already pronounced housing crisis? As to the flagship proposal to freeze energy prices; it is tough, it is populist, it is a vote-winner. But issuing edicts to energy companies means bills could yet rise before or after the freeze, and energy companies will stop investing on such critical issues as combating climate change.
Though, to Miliband’s eternal credit, the Conservative leader’s speech was notable for its riposte to the most powerful address of the party conference season: there were no fewer than 25 mentions of the Labour party or Ed Miliband, compared with none for UKIP. Tony Blair so often appeared to do so as leader of the opposition, but he beat a different path and was leading a party so achingly hungry for power that it was prepared to let Blair and co take it where they wanted it to go.
Labour, as etched out in his first address as leader, are the optimists now. Miliband vowed in his tentative first steps as leader to drive the Tories out of power after just one term, and to counter the David Cameron’s ‘miserable, pessimistic view’ of what the country can achieve under the guise of spending cuts. Three years later he has been bold enough to put his brand of ‘populist socialism’ at the heart of British politics. It is a gamble of unquantifiable proportions. He has, though, made the defining speech, one that will be seen as a key moment in determining his fate at the next election. This conference season could well have been the making of Ed Miliband, prime minister.
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David Talbot is a political consultant. He tweets @_davetalbot and writes the Countdown to 2015 column as part of the Campaign for a Labour Majority