Oh brother…

By Laurence Turner / @larry_turner

All candidates agree that this contest is about the future, but as we enter September it is hard to shake off the suspicion that our next leader will be decided by the ghost of conferences past.

Let me put my cards on the table. I am supporter of David Miliband, because I believe he has the gravitas to lead our party; the depth of policy understanding to genuinely renew Labour in opposition; and the ability to appeal to all sections of the electorate.

(Supporters of other candidates can start reading again now.)

I am also writing as someone who frequently despaired of New Labour during our thirteen years in office. Criticisms of New Labour are fashionably dismissed as naïve: we are incapable – we are told – of understanding the difficult compromises of office, the necessity of the modernisation project, or the impossibility of taking another path. Fortunately, the world is not neatly divided into competing camps of modernists and troglodytes.

The truth is that many party members accepted the need for modernisation, but were kept at arms length by the leadership. The party was too useful as an example of what New Labour was not; it was something for the government to be defined against, a perpetual symbol of the impossible politics of the 1980s. As a former aide to Tony Blair once put it, ‘if something is popular with the party there is a part of [Blair] that thinks there is probably something wrong with it.’ The resulting rift associated the leadership with arrogance and insincerity, and ensured that the membership was never fully brought into the modernisation process. One of New Labour’s core assumptions became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As any good progressive knows, a worm once trod upon will turn. Some supporters of Ed Miliband are attempting to paint David as the ‘continuity’ candidate whilst portraying Ed as a ‘break’ with the past. They clearly hope that this leadership contest will mark the revenge of the party on New Labour, and this line of argument may well end up swinging the election. I am unconvinced, and would make three points in response:

1. Both David and Ed Miliband were at the heart of New Labour in government. Both served as advisers, MPs and ministers. Ed went so far as to author the 2010 Manifesto. The main difference is that the brothers found themselves on different sides of the Blair-Brown divide.

2. If Ed really was the trenchant critic of New Labour that some would like to believe, what did he actually do about it? This is meant as a genuine question. Take Iraq. Along with over a million other Britons I marched in 2003, and would love to know if Ed similarly took positive action. Questions to Ed Miliband’s campaign on this matter have, so far, gone unanswered. Given that some will base their vote on the issue of Iraq, we deserve to know how deeply his opposition ran.

3. This leadership campaign has produced surprisingly little discussion of policy. The main disagreement between the Miliband brothers has been on the issue of university funding. This is hardly a repeat of the Bevan/Gaitskell struggle for the soul of the Labour Party.

There is a wider case against the low-level ‘sniping’ from both Miliband camps. We have, so far, avoided the fratricidal bloodletting that our opponents would dearly love to see. Long may that continue. Let us avoid another pitfall. The legacy of Thatcherism has divided the Conservative Party for twenty years, and kept them in opposition for the greater part of those two decades. Let us not repeat their mistakes. The worst thing we could do would be to replicate the structural weakness at the heart of New Labour – a destructive rivalry which owed far more to personality than policy. Our energy should be focused on fighting the iniquities of the present government, not spent wastefully on internal struggles and negative briefings. Only our opponents will gain in the end.

For me too, it is time to let go of the old hostility to New Labour. What is done is done, and the protagonists have departed the stage. There is nothing to be gained from fighting on; holding re-enactments of old battles will not change their outcome. We should instead learn from our mistakes, and preserve the best of our achievements. In the meantime, let us finish this leadership contest in the good spirit with which it started. Let us focus on the positive qualities of our different candidates, and conduct ourselves with a dignity which befits the Labour Party – and would befit a future Labour government.