Why I’m backing David Miliband for leader

By Gemma Doyle MP

It’s a funny time to be a Labour MP in Scotland (although as a new MP it’s a funny time in general).

We had fantastic results across the whole of Scotland at the election. We won every single one of our marginal seats, many where the majority went up, we had sitting MPs and new MPs elected with increased majorities and we even managed to win back two seats lost at by-elections in Dunfermline and Glasgow East.

Of course individual results can be explained by local circumstances, and in a tight race you get nowhere without hard work, but there was no doubt Scotland took a different decision to most of the rest of the UK at this election. They didn’t want the Tories back in.

This differential in results might be easy to explain, but it illustrates a difficult conundrum that the new leader must resolve; he or she will have to straddle this divided electorate.

Our new leader must rebuild a Labour coalition to win power again. Bringing together those who instinctively distrust and dislike the Tories, with those who had their head turned at this election. I’d love to know how many of them still think they made the right choice.

That doesn’t mean we dress up New Labour in new clothes. But it does mean that if we want to win in five years time our leader must be able to talk the language of our Scottish core vote, as well as Britain’s middle classes and the English working class, where stats show in certain areas we had our greatest loss of support. Welsh colleagues will speak much more knowledgably than I about the Welsh vote. I hope I don’t speak out of turn if I say their results were more similar to England than Scotland, but no doubt colleagues there will elaborate on the particular challenges they face.

David Miliband is the only leadership candidate who has shown through his campaign that he is fully committed to reaching out to all these electoral groups. In fact he seems to be the only candidate who wants to. Pandering to one section or another of either the membership or the electorate will get us nowhere. We won’t win the next election if that’s our strategy.

My constituency consistently has the second lowest life expectancy in Britain and the second highest unemployment rate in Scotland. Believe me, no-one wants or needs a Labour government more than my constituents and they and I know it. I want a leader who will lead us back to power, but who will also use that power wisely.

When David was foreign secretary I was lucky enough to attend his ministerial team meetings occasionally through my job as a PLP political officer. That’s when I formed my opinion of David. I was struck by the way he led his team and the respect they had for him. David was eager to hear from everyone round the table, all were encouraged to give their opinion. He listened, he considered and he made a decision. He made sure to report back decisions from cabinet. He was clear about how things would be taken forward and he was honest when he disagreed with someone. I was impressed.

These are exactly the skills we need in our new leader. I have no doubt that the Tories will be most worried about David winning the leadership contest. That should tell us something loud and clear.