Why I’m backing Ed Miliband for leader

By Mike Ion / @MikeIon

For some weeks now I have been taking every opportunity I can to tell my fellow Labour party members why I want Ed Miliband to be the next leader of our movement.

I was delighted when I heard that Ed had decided to throw his hat in the ring and for the past few weeks I have been actively supporting his campaign in any way that I can. I admire Ed Miliband enormously and feel that he is a man of integrity and stature, and I am confident that he will have broad appeal both across the party and the country.

For me Ed’s main appeal is his message that only collaboration can help make Britain everything that it ought to be – a nation reunited with itself and rededicated to its best ideals. Ed Miliband is a politician who is passionate that government must do things with people, he sees political debate in terms of progress versus conservatism and the world not in terms of right and left, but right and wrong.

One of the things that sets Ed apart from the other leadership contenders is the fact that he has long recognised that one of the the main reasons that people are turned off politics is because it (political debate) seems irrelevant to them. He understands many ordinary voters feel they are being manipulated because they are always being asked to make false choices: you’re labelled as either staunchly religious or vehemently secular, pro-business or pro-union, pro-growth or pro-environment, for civil liberties or against them, a progressive or a dinosaur.

Ed Miliband knows that the truth is, of course, that most people don’t think like this, that most people don’t live their lives in this way, and that the majority of the electorate long for a politics where we have genuine arguments, vigorous disagreements, where we don’t claim to have a monopoly on what is right or wrong, where we don’t demonise our political opponents. Most people want their politicians to engage in what Barack Obama called a “fair-minded” approach to politics; politics that understands that truth and certainty are not the same thing. Some describe this approach as the politics of the common good or perhaps more accurately, the politics of hope.

I am firmly of the view that Ed Miliband is the candidate who is best placed to help shape the future direction of our party. Ed is a conviction politician. He has proved himself as an effective and hard-working MP and as an outstanding government Minister. I am backing Ed because I want my party to be led by someone who will listen to ordinary party members, people who are driven not by personal ambition but by an ambitious agenda for our nation. Ed will be a leader who will challenge us – individually and collectively – not to just to want more but to be more and he is someone who is capable of inspiring trust and confidence across the political spectrum.

Ed Miliband espouses a politics that looks for co-operation not competition, the hand up and not just the hand out. Looking at how people have already signed up to support Ed, it is clear that many others believe that such sentiments are important – indeed they are worth voting for.