Why I’m backing Ed Miliband for leader

By John Denham MP

Thankfully, this Labour leadership election is no re-run of the poisonous Benn vs. Healey fight of 30 years ago. Anyone who has been to the hustings has seen a team of potential leaders who focus their ire on the mistakes of David Cameron and George Osborne, not on each other.

But we shouldn’t let the civility of proceedings mask the fact that there are some pretty fundamental political issues in play. The most important is about how much Labour needs to change to win again.

The truth is that the seeds of Labour’s defeat pre-dated Gordon Brown’s premiership. We lost power in 2010, but we had lost 4 million votes between 1997 and 2005. All the issues that cost us the last election – the loss of connection with hard-working families; concerns about the impact of migration; the deep sense of unfairness at the way effort was rewarded – were already established after our first two terms in office. The haemorrhage of our vote tells us that something more fundamental was at stake in 2010 than a failure to communicate effectively.

Labour needs a new leader who recognises these problems and has a plan to address them. The future cannot be a simple re-run of the past but with better presentation.

They need to learn the lesson, so clear from Lord Mandelson’s book, that we need to decisively turn the page on the era of Blairites and Brownites. We need a new leader that will put the infighting of the New Labour establishment behind us. Real strength comes from being open to ideas and debate, rather than treating politics like the genteel (and sometimes not so genteel) gang warfare described in Peter’s book.

But it is not just about leadership style. It also about learning the lessons as we put forward our programme for government.

It’s not hard to find members and supporters who are proud of what we achieved but who worry we could have done more. They feel that if we had stayed better in touch we could still have been in government today. And they are right.

We created many jobs but in a labour market where too many people found neither personal progress nor security. Our welfare reforms aided many of the poorest but sharpened the divide between those who received help and those who did not. Our public service reform got sidetracked – we recognised that people want choice within services, but we confused that with the idea that markets in public services are the only way to get improvement. The significance of the Iraq War is not how individuals voted but whether we recognise the failures in policy making that made the mistaken war possible. Our faith in the state solution to every problem led to a casualness about individual liberty.

The New Labour establishment’s view of the world does not meet these challenges. Unless we change we will not win.

The reason that many of us support Ed Miliband is because he is the credible candidate for change. Credible because he could beyond doubt be Prime Minister. And credible because he has set out most clearly how Labour needs to change if we are to win again.

He is willing to address the challenges of fairness and responsibility throughout society. That is true at the bottom of the income scale where he is campaigning for a Living Wage. It is true in the middle of the income scale where he will strengthen the contributory principle in welfare and ensure that people who pay in to the system see that rewarded. And it is true at the top of the very top of scale where he is in favour of a High Pay Commission.

He is willing to address the excesses of market power and the excesses of state power. Ed Miliband is right to argue that we need to protect crucial aspects of life from marketisation – whether by limiting advertising aimed at our children or by protecting our town centres from becoming a land of late night bars. And he is right to argue that we need to do much more to recognise that the state can be as over-bearing as the market, whether in the way it can intrude on civil liberties or the labyrinthine way in which services sometimes work.

The voters we lost will not easily be won back. They may be shocked and angered at the coalition’s actions but before they come back to us they will want to know that we have changed too. Ed Miliband is the candidate willing to make those changes. He is the candidate best able to win those voters back.