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Ed Miliband needs show that politics is about more than the desire to wrong foot your opponent

April 5, 2012 1:31 pm

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The sad truth is that (despite a few notable exceptions) the previous government did not make it easy for the electorate to vote Labour with any enthusiasm. On the doorstep in 2010 the divide between the concerns of core Labour voters and those of a PR-fixated cabinet never seemed wider. In fairness though; the history of Labour governments was ever thus.

Since the 1920s the story goes something like this: Labour supporters are near euphoric when victory is achieved there is then a period of hard slog as the party faces up to the harsh responsibilities of being in government. The party then accuses the leadership of betrayal and the leadership accuses the party of ingratitude. Supporters then become disillusioned which leads to defeat at the polls. We then experience a long period of Tory government before the next outbreak of euphoria and so on and so forth.

The result in Bradford West is an illustration that after an unprecedented 13 straight years in power many of Labour’s own members are not certain what they want. Many want the party to be both passionately principled and sensibly pragmatic; to be a party that proudly honours its past while not neglecting to shape both its and the nation’s future; to champion the state while being part of the market; to tackle poverty but also support aspiration.

Ed Miliband stood for the leadership of the Labour party on a platform that argued that the renewal that was undertaken in order to gain power in 1997 needs to be repeated if Labour is win at the next election. In the mid-1990s Labour successfully occupied the centre ground, it modernised and reached out beyond its own activists and turned the Tories into a replica of what it itself used to be – a party with a narrow base, a party obsessed about the wrong things and a party seen as old fashioned and out of touch.

Can Labour win under Ed Miliband? Of course it can but I strongly believe – and the failure of the tactics deployed in Bradford West seem to endorse my view – that the best prospects of future success for our party lie not in the puerile tactics of the spin doctor; politics has to be about more than the desire to wrong foot your opponent.

The prospects for future success for Labour lies not in defending the status quo of what is still a highly unequal Britain, rather it is in working with the British people to help rid our nation of some ugly realities such as child poverty and the still endemic inequalities in both health and education, inequalities that could well be even further entrenched once some of the savage and unnecessary cuts begin to fully impact. The politics of ambition and optimism must also be the politics of principle – we should attack our opponents for what they espouse, for their policies and not for their personal shortcomings.

In the coming weeks I hope that Ed will put the case that for a politics that seeks the liberation of people from poverty, injustice and persecution. He needs to show that a renewed Labour party will seek to better reflect the aspirations of ordinary people whilst being realistic about the challenges that lie ahead. Ambition, hope and aspiration are far more appealing than a constant reciting of the achievements of the past. Ed has been consistent about the need for the Labour party to be clearer about what we stand for as a movement and for the need for the party to reach out to the communities that it seeks to represent and support. He now needs to show how, under his leadership, our party can set about winning back the trust and confidence of the British people.

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  • externalities

    Absolutely. Yes, the party has to win elections but it needs to keep in mind at all times that winning elections is an end rather than a means. Even if it won the next election, I worry the leadership’s first meeting would be on how to win the next one, and politics and PR would trump policy. That means not touching anything that could be controversial, no matter how much good it could do; being so tribal as to attack others’ good policies just for the sake of opposition; and deliberately being only slightly different to the Tories, which unfortunately is the strategy FPTP promotes. This last point, incidentally, is why the public are so disillusioned by politics. We need good policies and honest politicians who can fight for them with conviction; not more media relations and pasty-eating photo ops.

  • JoeDM

    “Since the 1920s the story goes something like this: Labour supporters are near uphoric when victory is achieved there is then a period ……….  which leads to defeat at the polls.”

    The 3 easy victories of  Tony Blair and the 13 years of Labour dominance  seem to have been air-brushed from this version of history.

    • Brumanuensis

      In what sense was 2005 ‘easy’? We won by about 3% of the popular vote.

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Homfray/510980099 Mike Homfray

        We largely won because of the continuing reluctance of Tories to return to the fold. A lot of votes were lost to the LD’s that year

      • AlanGiles

        .and a Parliamentary majority of 166 was reduced to 67. I think JoeDM forgets just how unpopular Blair was with Labour voters, supporters and evn MPs by 2006/7 – as do a lot of those like Jon on LL who would like to see a return to Blairism.

  • madasafish

    “
    The result in Bradford West is an illustration that after an unprecedented 13 straight years in power many of Labour’s own members are not certain what they want    ”

    How can they be?

    Some – indeed many if not most – Government Ministers are effectively saying “we’ll spend what we need to and borrow more”  - see Ed  Balls for one . If you actually belive what politicians say then you would believe the deficit is a Tory invention and that austerity is an evil Tory plot to make the poor poorer.
    As for reforming the benefit system to reward those who work more than those who do not, does anyone understand what Labour’s policy is  - except they are against it?

    And the NHS.. well that’s obvious there. labour will reverse all teh Tory changes. or will they?

    And the changes to education. Labour will reverse education changes. or will they.

    A party which tells its supporters that everything under them was right and under the Tories is wrong.. has a credibility problem. As it is just not true.

    Mike said: “He needs to show that a renewed Labour party will seek to better reflect the aspirations of ordinary people whilst being realistic about the challenges that lie ahead”

    So that means either Ed Balls is fired or does a U turn. That shows the extent of the problem on economics…

    I agree with the article. I doubt Mr Miliband has the balls to do what he needs to do to address the issues raised. if he has, he’ll be a fine leader.

  • Daniel Speight

    The prospects for future success for Labour lies not in defending the status quo of what is still a highly unequal Britain…

    A major problem is 13 years of New Labour rule left Britain even more unequal. The leadership needs to state that this will not happen again.

  • Brumanuensis

    A strangely vacuous article. There’s nothing in here that anyone would disagree with, and I do mean anyone, as if you stripped out references to ‘Labour’ and ‘Ed Miliband’ this could be written by a member of any major political party. This makes it completely uninformative, as all we have are a list of platitudes.

    Mike Ion has written better articles than this in the past, needless to say.

    • Mike-ion

      Thank you Brumanuensis – my point is that we (Labour) must resist the temptation to reduce politics to a kind of ‘pastygate’, look how more ‘connected’ with ordinary people we are series of activities and events.

      • Brumanuensis

        I feel rather guilty now Mike, but I’m not going to row back from my initial impression. I appreciated your point about being ‘connected’ with the concerns of ordinary voters, but I’m not sure that that particular point was one anyone had missed. I’m sure Ed Miliband wants to follow your advice, but he probably sees ‘pastygate’ as just that sort of connection strategy.

        As you’ve been so polite in replying to my rather fude response, I’ll try and strike a more amicable note. What do you think a more authentic campaign would resemble? How do we distill the essence of a political point on something like VAT without coming across as patronising?

        • Brumanuensis

          *rude

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