David’s daft question

By Daniel Blaney

By putting such a daft question to Harriet Harman during Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour Party Conference, David Miliband has already demonstrated why the Labour Party was right to elect his brother.

What was David doing asking the deputy leader of the Labour Party asking why she was applauding the leader? Her answer was perfect – she is his loyal deputy. None of us would expect anything else. She did not need to provide any other explanation. David may have thought he was being clever; after all Harman did vote the Iraq War. But this issue was covered in detail during the deputy leadership election in 2007 and Harman won in part because of her contrition and her understanding of the anger and hurt within the party. Her record is better than his. She has no need to explain herself further to the defeated former Foreign Secretary.

Iraq, despite the attempts by some on the hard right of the party to paint it as an irrelevant old story, remains the single biggest source of anger for those who rejected the party at recent elections. It also remains a massive scar within the party because many of us who stuck with it were as angry as anybody in Britain. It is the issue on which the new leadership of Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman will have to be vigilant and candid if the party is going to continue to regain the trust of the millions of British people who have protested, on the streets and at the ballot box, since 2003.

It does remains baffling to the anti-war constituency in the country why so many Labour MPs did support an illegal invasion led by George W Bush. But Ed Miliband knows he is leading a parliamentary party which still contains MPs who voted for the Iraq War and who have defended their actions ever since. His comments have been diplomatic towards them, but he is firm in his message to the wider party and to the country: the Iraq War was wrong.

By recognising the balance of opinion within the movement without being inhibited by it, Ed Miliband’s speech showed good qualities of leadership. And Ed Miliband’s position on Iraq is entirely consistent with Harman’s approach as set out in 2007. They have established a potential course for the party to recover from the most damaging episode in its history.

David Miliband never understood the dynamic within the movement he sought to lead, and his approach as foreign secretary showed he learnt little from the foreign policy mistakes the last Labour government made. The media assertion that he was the most electable of the leadership candidates was always a bit bizarre. He would have struggled to have attracted back the millions who deserted the party, and would have struggled to restore confidence in those of us who stayed but whose loyalty was painfully strained by Iraq and its aftermath. His question to a loyal and effective deputy leader, whose record since her election in 2007 has been so reassuring to so many, simply demonstrated how out of touch he is.

Meanwhile Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband have demonstrated their leadership that can unite the party and reassure those of us active in the peace movement that we are a part of the coalition they want to lead to victory at the next election.