Moving on and moving up

By Jim Sweetman

The leadership race is over and his conference speech showed that an excellent candidate came first. The closeness of the results also testified to the quality of all of the candidates. So, where do we go next? Well, the media seem to have a good idea. David won’t be able to work with Ed Miliband because Louise (Mrs Miliband) is so furious over the result. He’s leaving frontline politics or playing out a biblical epic – take your pick. The other Ed won’t be able to work with Alistair Darling. Diane and Andy will not be able to work with anyone and, horrors of horrors, the unions are to blame for everything just like the old times. If you saw the end of Friday’s BBC2 Newsnight where the party conference and the leadership election was compared using morphed video and martial music to the activity surrounding Kim Jong in North Korea you could see the Daily Mail’s message of the week intellectualised by the BBC.

It beggars belief that a campaign of genuine quality carried out in an atmosphere of mutual respect can be being rubbished within a week of the result being announced and, more to the point, it is an indication of the difficult journey to government which lies ahead. There were even plenty of MPs, some of whom ought to know better, contributing their thoughts as to who should do what in the shadow cabinet before the nominations closed.

Whatever Ed Miliband says this week and next he will be assumed to be moving to the left and to that frightening place where middle England does not want to go. That is no bad thing for the party and there is plenty of space there for party renewal and growth but when mediated by the right-wing press it will not go down well. So, where do we need to go as well?

One of the things that attracted the popular vote to Ed Miliband was that he is viewed as neither a Brownite nor a Blairite and that is important in bringing Labour together. He is also untainted by the past and too young to have inhaled in the 60s or joined the anarchists. He represents difference and that is important. It stood Obama in good stead on his way to the White House because he presented a shifting target to his opponents and Ed Miliband can do the same. In so doing, he can tackle David Cameron on social and political change and the uprooting of old institutions from a labour perspective of social equality and concern rather than for the benefit of Old Etonians.

This sense of change can be used to drive the shadow cabinet. This is going to be an extremely powerful team of personalities with a wealth of experience. If they start arguing among themselves and briefing against one another Labour will fall apart and there will be plenty of people around sticking anything they can find into any available crack. It will be much better not to claim a unified position from the off but to say that this is a team which will reflect on, review and rebuild policies in key areas and to encourage debate, openness and transparency. If we can do it for expenses, why not for opinion. The Labour Party needs to look more like Google than IBM with a focus on the future rather than the assets and with the leadership and team management to match. In four years time, there will have to be an agreed manifesto but, until then, debate should be encouraged and the leader of the Labour Party should simply say that he is not accountable for every word said by his extremely accomplished team colleagues while, of course, they are there to defend and discuss them without reference to some party line that no one can cross.

Agreement in a team like this is driven by a clear understanding of the mission. The personalities involved have to share that discussion and that means more than simply making the party electable. It means stating core values and principles and clear directions. Moving away from inequality and negotiating a way out of conflicts then becomes a concern for every area of government underlying foreign policy as much as domestic, taxation as much as spending.

The worst mistake to make is to let things ride. One American innovation guru, Scott Anthony, has recently been writing about failure and the power of positive failure. He has also identified some areas of failures that are simply bad for everyone. The first of them is when someone knowingly does the wrong thing and the second is when someone could’ve easily discovered that they were doing the wrong thing and done something about it. There’s a lesson for the past and for the future there.