Stand up and be trusted

By Luke Pearce

First as contender and then as leader, Ed Miliband has shown himself willing to stand up for Labour principles and able to articulate them in a way that sounds both reasonable and novel. This has earned him some critics within the party and many enemies outside of it.

So far his politically intelligent strategy has worked: Miliband was the candidate most able to build a broad base of support in the leadership election, as evidenced by his actually winning it; multiple polls suggest that Labour has, for now, regained levels of support not seen for several years, while thousands of people continue to join the party.

My view is that Miliband and Labour’s success over the next few years will depend on sticking to this new balance of pragmatism and principle. When the haze of goodwill that greets a new leader inevitably clears, Miliband must go with his gut belief in the electoral popularity of a truly social democratic message.

In his leader’s speech, Miliband was right to attempt to draw explicit dividing lines between the last Labour government and the ‘new generation’. By describing the Iraq war as ‘wrong’, saying he would reposition Labour as the party of liberty, admitting the failure to properly monitor the city and accounting for the anger over immigration in terms of its effect on workers’ economic insecurities (rather than some sort of innate White-Cliffs-of-Dover racism), Miliband appeared to ‘move left’ and annoyed a few people in the party. The slightly awkward applause at conference reflected this.

His message was more strategic than ideological. These were key issues of the past decade that formed the main support to charges (right or wrong) from across the political spectrum that Labour was a war-mongering, state-obsessed, aloof party more interested in cozying up to the rich and powerful than improving conditions for ordinary working people.

Agree with Miliband’s stance or not, these were significant lines of attack against Labour and the new leader had to neutralise them to give himself a fresh start in the minds of the electorate and regain their trust. Miliband understood this better than the other Labour leadership contenders.

Gordon Brown’s most popular poll ratings as leader appeared when he seemed to represent a change from the later Blair years: more emphasis on social justice, re-examining public sector reform, UK troops to leave Iraq and noises about protecting civil liberties. Certainly the early Brown poll bounce indicated that some of Labour’s millions of lost voters were willing to give the party a second chance.

Then came a string of issues which seemed to epitomise the characterisation of Brown as a weak, bitter and controlling Prime Minister who did not represent significant change from Blair, himself extremely unpopular by 2007. 42 days’ detention, the bottled election, managerial mess-ups and unprincipled ‘middle-way’ positioning on inheritance tax which lost Labour a great opportunity to present itself as a party of fairness and meritocracy.

His poll ratings never recovered after October 2007, well before the recession. The tragedy is that Brown was and remains a deeply principled and passionate man on issues such as social justice and international development. He was always stronger as a leader rather than a manager.

To avoid Brown’s fate, Miliband will need to sustain his own identity and continue to lead, not pander. Pressures will come to tack to the right, accept the coalition narrative on the deficit and return to the cruder pragmatism of New Labour ‘because it won us three elections’.

Of course Miliband should remain proud of the previous Labour government’s successes. But the old stalwarts must know deep down that constantly paying homage to former achievements will not bring a majority in 2015. Neither will sticking to the strategy of the 1990s.

The winning party will be the one that can best interpret and use the past to explain Britain’s present situation, and then offer a distinctive and confident vision for the future. This party will have a leader who shows he believes in himself by presenting a principled narrative, not one who views voters as dispassionate calculators and cynically tries to find the middle road on every issue.

Based on his actions so far, I suspect that Miliband has already read or at least understands the ideas laid out in Drew Westen’s great book, ‘The Political Brain’, as Obama did before applying the lessons to build his popular movement in 2008. The rhetoric will need tweaking to reflect British culture, but the central tenets of human psychology are universal. It is OK to stand up for what you believe in. People will respect your honesty and even vote for you if they feel they can trust you and you are not insanely ideological to the point of wanting to nationalise children’s train sets.

Miliband will likely rise above the backroom briefing of Westminster and the name-calling in the press. He has already demonstrated confidence by standing for leader and being willing to move on from Blair’s clever Old/New Labour dichotomy. The task now will be to have the courage to put his name to a manifesto at least as radical and popular as that of 1997.