Reviving Ed Milband

By David Talbot / @_davetalbot

Surveying his party after its third successive defeat, the Labour leader decided it was time to take on the old loyalties of his party. He vehemently believed that the self-defeating nature of Labour’s ideological purity was embodied in the Clause IV of Labour’s constitution, which had enshrined the party’s ethos towards public ownership. This stance was constraining the ideological progression of the party and condemning it to electoral defeats. After his attempts to redefine the party’s aims in a way that no other Labour leader had yet dared try, his leadership has been described as a “coup” against the central ideological faiths of the Labour Party.

The Labour leader in question is Hugh Gaitskell, Labour leader from 1955-63, and the impetus behind the rise of revisionism at the heart of the Labour Party. His attempt to revise Clause IV at the Labour Party conference of 1959 has clear echoes of the rise of the New Labour project in the mid 1990s. In some respects Blair can be seen as Gaitskell writ large. Blair was prepared in his formative years to push the boundaries of revisionism against all that was formerly sacred in the Labour Party. New Labour can be seen to have accomplished the final stage of the revisionist movement that the likes of Gaitskell and Anthony Crosland became so devoted to in the 1950s.

The ideological vehicle that both Gaitskell and Blair chose in their respective attempts to revive the Labour Party was a revisionist doctrine that involved a radical discontinuity in Labour’s dogma. Both leaders recognised that it was not only policy that had caused successive Labour election defeats, it was image and impression. In promoting revisionism as they did, Gaitskell and Blair forced the Labour Party to painfully confront, for the first time since 1918, what their party should actually stand for.

Ed Miliband faces a similar problem today. A year after a defeat of historic proportions the process of renewal must start in earnest. The sense of drift is palpable. A doctrine of permanent revisionism should be undertaken to renew a jaded Labour Party unsure of its direction and position in British politics. In the coming years, the spending cuts will bite, the economy will remain stagnant and the manifest strains within the coalition will intensify. Miliband must use this time to fix negative perceptions of himself and his party and create the impression that he is the next prime minister. Timidity will no longer do. He must talk to audiences outside his comfort zone, he must revive Labour’s economic credibility, if not by apologising for overspending, then at least by elucidating which cuts he would make. And he must sculpt a strategy which doesn’t make Labour’s opposition seem redundant.

The relationship between a revisionist leader and the Labour Party is always strained. Gaitskell for years faced fierce internal opposition, no more so than from that great figurehead of the Labour Party Aneurin Bevan. Blair is universally despised by his party. But the most crucial aspect that they both brought to the Labour Party was placing the gaining and holding of power at the centre of their political project. This was secured by constantly challenging the Labour Party and with a total focus on delivering transformative change.

When he arrived in Downing Street, Blair’s greatest weakness was to have little to do with office but hold it. His revisionist zeal and quest for constant renewal did not inhabit vast swathes of his premiership. Miliband cannot make the same mistake. Perpetual revisionism must now be his mindset.