The good news: it was a speech Tony Blair could easily have given. The semi-approving invocation of Margaret Thatcher, the silence where Labour’s past ought to be, the promise to break down old institutions and reorient public services: it was all there.
Now for the bad news: It was a speech Tony Blair could easily have given in 1994. Listening to Ed Miliband, you could be forgiven for thinking that he was looking to return Labour to power after 36 years of political exile as opposed to a mere five. I’ve never been particularly concerned with defending the record – if Labour partisans wanted to defend the record, they shouldn’t have let Gordon Brown lead the party to an entirely avoidable defeat in 2010 – but it is important to know where you’ve come from in order to properly understand the road that you are on.
If inequality was off the political agenda under Blair and Brown, it does make one wonder what exactly the Social Exclusion Unit was for, or why the Blair government signed up to the Social Chapter and the minimum wage. I do not think that Chris Smith brought in free entry to museums and art galleries because he didn’t fancy shelling out to see a little Rodin now and again, or Harriet Harman’s Equality Act was ironically named. I think they were the hallmarks of a government that saw reducing inequality as its defining mission.
And, yes: at the end of the story, the mission failed. The echoes of Thatcherism – and the slow destruction of unskilled jobs – meant that it took a more redistributive government than Attlee’s just to hold inequality in place. It’s also true that defeated parties can choose to lose themselves in defending the past, or occupy themselves in winning the future. But reading Ed Miliband’s Hugo Young lecture I couldn’t help but feeling a faint sense of unease.
We are now just over a year away from an election that Labour is on course to win with a majority, and very probably a large one. The Labour leadership is playing a blinder; the Tories can’t touch the Eds, the Liberals are stuck in a battle for third place and, barring a sudden cataclysm, the result in 2015 is nailed on. But for all Ed Miliband is set to defy his party’s history, he does not yet look set to escape his movement’s present. Across Europe and America, progressive politics is dominated by the children of Third Way progressives – from Clinton to Schroeder to Jospin to Blair – who have looked at their predecessors and declared them, as Barack did of Bill, to be ‘non-transformational’. The reality of government, though, is that the paradigm-shifters have proved even less transformational than their supposedly quisling predecessors. Income inequality is higher after six years of Obama than it was after eight years of Bush. He, at least, won re-election, in stark contrast to France, Denmark and Greece, where the social democratic movement looks to have suffered victories from which they may never recover.
That’s not because the post-crash progressives have failed – I still think that Obama has been a more effective president than Clinton was – but because the task is ever more difficult. E-commerce has destroyed large, wealth-diffusing employers and replaced them with lucrative start-ups with subatomic staffing levels. Technology has done more to squeeze the middle than any number of centre-right politicians.
Those are real problems without easy solutions that require more than stating that your predecessors simply didn’t care enough. Ed Miliband has the correct diagnosis of Britain’s ills, which will be enough to ensure that he ends up in No 10 in 2015. It is not yet clear whether or he has done enough to be able to apply a cure thereafter.
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Stephen Bush is a contributing editor to Progress, writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb