I have been an Ed Miliband supporter for a really long time. I supported him throughout his leadership campaign and before that I was a real admirer of his work in department of energy and climate change. I saw him inspire young climate change campaigners and get them enthusiastic about Labour’s work. I knew this was a man who could inspire others to achieve and to believe again in the Labour party. I wanted to see that inspiration from our leader.
I was delighted when Ed won the leadership and I have been generally very pleased with the overall direction the party has taken. One of his great strengths has been in bringing the party together and finding common causes we can unite behind. That has been truly and obviously advantageous during this election campaign with the support being thrown behind every candidate coming from every part of the party. If Ed has focused on a ‘one nation’ policy strategy, he has also managed a ‘one party’ organisational strategy that has led to a year of united campaigning to beat the Tories.
But I have had my dark days. Ed has not always demonstrated that communication ability I had seen in him all those years ago and as such struggled sometimes to make the right arguments for the kind of change he believes in – the kind of change I believe in. His press has been almost unrelentingly negative. A lot of that is out of our gift – especially after rightly standing up against Murdoch over phone hacking and later supporting Leveson – but there are ways we can and should have countered that sooner.
I have also had my quibbles on policy and strategy. That is only right in the kind of democratic coalition that makes up the modern Labour party. Having my differences with the leadership keeps my thinking sharp and my support frequently questioned and then reaffirmed. I genuinely believe my support is the stronger for that. I reject the notion that loyalty must always be its own reward.
All of which is leading up to saying that Ed Miliband is having a truly excellent short campaign.
I will admit there were things about which I had my doubts. I felt the challenger’s debate would not work well for Ed as a format. I thought the ganging up from the left would throw this decent social democrat off his stride. It did not. It helped him create a centre ground on which he was truly comfortable. More practical than the left, but also more willing to listen; disparaging of the right’s cheap posturing but speaking to maturely to those it was aimed at.
Ed came out of that debate a leader, both in terms of the clarity of the vision he has for the country and the sense the public suddenly got that he might just be the person to take us there. But he refused to stop there.
Roy Jenkins once famously described Tony Blair’s task in getting Labour into power in 1997 as ‘like a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor.’ That Blair was doing so under significantly more accommodating circumstances than Ed is now is obvious. So his fans and critics alike will forgive me when I continue to hold my breath when Ed takes risks in the campaign. However wrong I am. The vase is not safely on the plinth yet. The safe campaigner would then have at the front of their mind ‘why risk it?’
Why indeed? Well, one such risk was yesterday’s interview with Russell Brand. I was worried that in the end, Ed would be spoken over and boxed out; made a figure of fun in the zero sum game of anti-politics. But he did not. And all of us have a valuable lesson to learn from that.
Ed was the first politician whose reputation rode on it to really engage with the anti-politics paradigm and the social media age. He has challenged the former and excelled in the latter. Ultimately Ed has been Ed Uncut – and it has been a sight to behold. In the shortness of the short campaign it seems Ed has just been who he wants to be and has taken every opportunity to revel in it.
Ed has proved my occasional fears and cynicism wrong. But the thing I have never wavered on is the strength of our army of volunteers. Our members are extraordinary and remain a huge part of how we hope to defy the odds in close seat after close seat. Ed’s continuing fight to empower members and put them at the heart of our politics has paid off.
The fight the Labour party is facing across the country is one that we are so ready for. We have already had four million conversations. Let us now develop the work of Arnie Graf that worked so well in opposition and take it forward to the whole country to continue this momentum. Win or lose this time – ultimately that will be Ed Miliband’s lasting legacy of success. A party engaged with its members and active in its communities. Winning elections in the in between times as well as being the awesome machine the Tories rightly fear.
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Emma Burnell is a political blogger and campaigner. She tweets @EmmaBurnell_
I supported David in the leadership but accepted that the people who knew both brothers had supported Ed as the better long term leader. It still took him longer than I wanted to make his mark, despite all the obvious talent. Now all he has to prove is that he will make a better PM than any of us expected. No pressure, then, Ed.
You say we should have ‘countered’ the media’ but I wonder how.With the gap so close obviously the Press barons and their papers have been awful in their attempt to close that gap. With the BBC the greatest problem has been how the public broadcaster has taken for granted the deliberately created Tory Press Agenda and then churned it up each day.
The BBC has lost that true impartiality it had from the Tabloid press in earlier elections and gone for a populist, dumbed down approach to political coverage almost to the extent it is Tabloid TV and radio. It has also not reflected on the real issues of the Austerity Consensus, the EU exit, the UK’s growing inequality beyond the M25 shires, the struggling families facing savage cuts, the complete collapse of a One-Nation Tory appeal and the UK PM’s dangerous attack on the preferences of the Scottish voters who are part of the UK. As some one close to the BBC has stated “Its the Daily Mail on Legs”.
It says everything about the child-like qualities of individuals – such as Emma above – that she can not see, that the general public will be disgusted, that a possible PM candidate of this country, would seek out and have political discussion, on the direction of this country, from a man who indulged in a vulgar prank smearing the female relative of a much-loved actor.
Emma’s judgemental bar seems to be set extremely low.