The leader’s speech is Ed Miliband’s last chance to win the mantle of prime minister-in-waiting, writes Philip Collins
In one sense Miliband knows exactly what he needs to do. He finds himself in the position of Margaret Thatcher in 1978 and Tony Blair in 1996, two party leaders who we see now as distinctive and serious prime ministers. It can easily slip the historical memory that there was a time when their fitness for high office was not obvious. Both were lampooned and derided as insufficiently serious. Both came to their party conferences before their respective first election victories with the pressing need to prove their credentials to the nation.very draft of a leader’s speech at Labour party conference is provisional but this year even more than most. Two questions threaten to overwhelm the speech that Ed Miliband might otherwise have delivered. Miliband is at his best, and at his most comfortable, on domestic questions, especially when they concern the distribution of income. This time, though, events outside his comfort zone are forcing themselves upon his attention and forcing their way into his speech.
The overwhelming question for this forthcoming speech is therefore whether Miliband can present himself as a plausible prime minister. Some conference speeches do not have such an obvious task. This one does and there is a comfort in that. However, whatever pleasure there is in defining the task soon gives way to alarm. How on earth do you achieve that?
The central domestic question, with respect to credibility, remains the same as it has been ever since Miliband became leader and to which he has never had a full answer. A Labour government after 2015 will have to cut the size of the state. It will have to run public services in an era when money is tight rather than plentiful. It will have to preside over a less generous welfare state and a National Health Service which is consuming money that cannot, therefore, be spent on anything else.
Labour continues to trail the Conservatives decisively and alarmingly on economic questions. This deficit of credibility is a good part too of why Miliband’s own leadership rating is so poor, relative to that of the prime minister. The conference speech is one of his last opportunities to do something about these deficiencies.
Miliband’s conference speeches so far have had three characteristics. They have dwelt, not wholly but mostly, on economic territory. They have been marked by as much theatre in the manner of delivery as respect for the content. Then, last year, the speech became in effect a vehicle for a policy announcement, the energy price freeze, which subsequently dominated the next term of politics. The conference speech as leader of the opposition is difficult. You have only words, a critique, rather than any actions to advertise. After a poor first effort and a second that was marred by the foolish distinction between ‘producers’ and ‘predators’ which collapsed in its first television interviews, Miliband has done well in the spotlight.
Now he faces the ‘prelude to Downing Street’ speech. It is, essentially, an audition before the nation. This speech might not have counted much. In truth, most conference speeches do not linger in the memory (I have written some I cannot even remember) and most of them do not matter for long, if at all. This one will matter because, eight months from now, Miliband could be prime minister.
That means he has to lift his sights. The vast majority of Miliband’s speeches so far as leader have been on the home front. He is a distinctly domestic speaker. He is also, more narrowly than that, a mostly economic speaker and, drilling down even a stage further, he does at times sound like a labour market economist. This speech has to widen the canvas. At home, it has to tell a reform story. Labour still does not sound credible when it is asked what social democracy looks like without money. Miliband desperately needs an answer to that question. Then the Labour leader needs to offer an account of how he intends to lead the nation in an unstable period.
To take the second point first, some leader’s speeches avoid foreign policy questions altogether. This one cannot do so. Miliband’s (rather opportunistic and belated) opposition to the war in Iraq helped him to win the Labour leadership. His one foreign policy outing so far was his part (to my mind, inglorious) in the parliamentary vote which prevented any action against Bashar al-Assad in Syria. That is a rather thin basis on which to confront the existential crises of today’s foreign policy.
The emergence of Islamic State changes the calculation. It now cannot be denied that something barbarous is abroad in the Middle East. To stand aside and do nothing is a policy choice with consequences just as much as military intervention. The region is now full of serious crises, in which dictators hold together nations through repression and dissident religious groups of even more startling brutality wait to take over. It is possible, indeed likely, that before the next general election Britain will be involved in military action in Iraq. As strange as it might be to write such a sentence and contemplate such a fate, this poses a question that Miliband will have to answer.
If he inherits a military commitment in Iraq, what is his attitude to it? It seems that he believes that the presence of Islamic State makes Iraq different from Syria. Labour has pointedly not ruled out military action. In his conference speech Miliband needs to clarify this. He needs to give us a sense of how Labour would approach one of the great questions of our lifetimes. Blair’s analysis of the conflict is clear. He believes we confront a single enemy – a united form of perverse Islam intent on a Muslim caliphate across the Middle East. Does Miliband agree? Is he prepared to act, if so?
There is a second foreign policy question which, by the time of the conference speech, may impress itself upon Miliband. The prospect of Scottish independence has the capacity to overwhelm the speech. If the Scots have voted ‘Yes’, a Miliband victory in 2015, on a minority of the seats which includes more than 40 Scottish members of parliament, will be widely seen to be illegitimate. A ‘Yes’ vote changes everything. Indeed, it makes a long-term future for the sort of politics that Miliband represents pretty unlikely. The Blair victories between 1997 and 2005 would still have been won but it is hard to see how Labour can win from a position to the left of Blair without Scottish seats.
A ‘Yes’ vote on 18 September means that the next parliament might be attenuated – nobody really knows – and its only issue might be the negotiations covering the departure of Scotland. If that is the case then Miliband might as well tear up the drafts he has been working on. He would have to include a section that, even a few months ago, he would never have contemplated.
The conference speech is bound to have a theme, a title, a conceit – ‘forces of conservatism’ or ‘one nation’ or some such. Every speech does. These overarching titles matter more to the writer than they do to anyone else. They are little more than a technical answer to a problem that only the conference speech poses – how to link so many disparate subjects without stretching credulity. The test, though, is not whether it is skilfully knitted. That should hold for all conference speeches. It is whether, when he sits down, more people see Miliband as Britain’s next prime minister than did when he stood up.
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Philip Collins is a columnist at the Times and a former speechwriter to Tony Blair
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Join Philip and others at Progress Question Time tonight:
Progress Question Time
6-7.15pm, Tuesday 23 September 2014
Lancashire Room, Peter House, Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5AN
Ivan Lewis MP Shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland
Emma Reynolds MP Shadow minister for housing
Philip Collins Chief leader writer, The Times
Jacqui Smith Former home secretary
Steve Turner Assistant general secretary, Unite