Labour must avoid the ‘comfort zone’: but this applies to David Miliband too

By Sunny Hundal / @sunny_hundal

I think we’re all agreed that the media-hyped “war of words” between Ed and David Miliband is not worth getting annoyed over. They are looking for a massive fight and we should avoid handing it to them.

But the extended Labour leadership election has finally opened up a notable cleavage between the two leading candidates.

David Miliband yesterday warned of the danger of retreating to Labour’s “comfort zone”. Ed Miliband retorted by saying we should avoid “staying in the New Labour comfort zone”.

We might be splitting hairs here, but it’s worth emphasising that both sides are partly right. The left cannot just talk about re-distribution all the time. Politically, it may appeal to about 25-30% of the population but it will not win Labour an election or allow the party to push that agenda in power.

The Labour Party has to talk about growing the economy and not just accepting economic stagnation (while finding other ways to improve living standards of course); it has to carry middle class families; it has to appeal to aspirational people who want it to be a party of opportunity not just progressive taxation. But quite specifically, it should avoid being the party of big business elites, and focus on SMEs and entrepreneurs – the driving force of any economy.

Unfortunately, because the left doesn’t talk enough about these sides of the political economy, it’s easy to paint us all as people only interested in super-high taxation.

But there are questions about the “comfort zone” that the David Miliband camp are reluctant to answer too.

How did the party lose so many voters over the last 13 years? Why did party identification fall from 44% to 34% from 2005 – 2010? We can attribute the actual vote of 29% to Brown’s unpopularity, but it still doesn’t explain why a relentlessly centrist New Labour party, that adopted Alistair Darling’s economic strategy rather than that of Ed Balls, lost so many voters.

This is what Ed Miliband is alluding to, and the charge that David Miliband is avoiding.

The Progress wing of the party assume that working class people or liberal-lefties have no choice but to hold their nose and vote Labour. I’m afraid that might work for Polly Toynbee but that didn’t work for millions of us (including myself) who felt lefties weren’t just ignored but were despised by the hierarchy.

Unless the party accounts for those votes, they’ll just stay at home, despite the coalition’s cuts.

The US is an instructive example here: Barack Obama’s main problem now in the upcoming mid-term elections isn’t right-wing anger (which has always been there) but distinct lack of enthusiasm among Democratic voters. They feel the President has let them down and they cannot bring themselves to go out and vote as they did in 2008.

A Labour leader needs to unite all wings of the party: the left, the liberals and the centrists. That also means he will have to step outside of the “comfort zone” and admit the party got it wrong and alienated millions of voters over the last 13 years.

Sunny Hundal is editor of Liberal Conspiracy. He tweets here.