Miliband’s challenge: defining the riots

By Natan Doron / @natandoron

London is approaching something resembling calm. There is still much to do, especially in the rest of the country. It would appear though that we are on the right path to restoring order. The political challenge however, is now beginning. It is essential we are ready to counter the Tory line which is already gathering momentum.

This extract from Conservative Home should make worrying reading for all those on the left today:

“Janan Ganesh got it right in yesterday’s Economist Blightly blog. This isn’t the early 1980s. The reaction to these riots will be different from then. People are seeing looters steal expensive sportwear and flat screen TVs. This isn’t cuts, it’s criminality. He notes that the political pendulum swung rightwards after similar episodes in LA and France. If Cameron can master this moment it will be a defining moment in his premiership.”

Ed Miliband has so far been spot on in supporting efforts to restore order and to ensure that work to repair damage is fast tracked in the worst-hit areas. The big political challenge is to make sure that these events are now not explained and defined by David Cameron. This will be hard. He is the Prime Minister. People want to hear what he has to say. But after the phone hacking saga, Ed Miliband now also has a window of opportunity to contribute. The risks are huge. But so are the potential gains.

The line coming from Conservative Party corners are that Cameron’s task on his return from Tuscany came in two parts. Essentially: 1) Restore order 2) Define what happened as something to which the answer is Conservative politics.

The Tories are desperate to hammer home that the cuts are not to blame for the riots. They caricature the left’s position as being only about this. It is important that we outflank them and spell out that the cuts are not to blame. But they are also not going to help. As Boris Johnson pointed out earlier, cuts to policing are an obvious place to start rethinking. There were promising signs this morning when Ed Miliband spoke about events on BBC Radio 5:

“The causes are not simple, they are complex… the Labour Party is not going to engage in simplistic explanations about this”

The struggle will now be to build on this and articulate the view that these events are not just a failing of justice. Violence that we have seen is not justified by the social and political context. But we need to understand that context to paint our vision of how we move forward. Dan Hodges called on everyone to essentially, not have a discussion yesterday. Ironically, it was in this article that he briefly hinted at where the discussion needs to move:

“There is lot we do need to hear. And lots that needs to be said. About the dislocation of inner-city youth. About the link between crime and poverty. About race and resentment. About lack of employment and educational opportunities. The widening gap between the rich and poor. The politics and the sociology and the criminology. All deserve, indeed require, an airing.”

One of the bottom lines in all of this is that this is not just about building a society where there are, in the words of Conservative Home, ‘consequences for doing the wrong thing’. An analysis which focuses too much on this will be insufficient for tackling the kind of root causes which Hodges hinted at.

Though a vastly different political and cultural context, China is a country that can boast consequences for doing the wrong thing. Over there you can get the death penalty for things like tax evasion or possession of cannabis. They also deal fairly harshly with civil disobedience. Surely the path we should be plotting as a nation is one more optimistic than this?

We have to be clear. The violence isn’t justified. We need order on the streets. We need to rebuild the communities damaged by all of this but we also need to have a grown up conversation about the causes of what we have seen.

This is the kind of talk we need to hear from Ed Miliband in the next few days. He can’t do it hysterically, and to be fair to him – hysteria is not a quality often associated with a leader who has been described as, ‘sensible and unhurried’. But he must reassure the public that the “logical” next step is not one to the right. This will probably involve restating that New Labour was wrong to be relaxed about the gap between rich and poor. But if Ed Miliband, and the wider Labour movement can get this right, we can build even further on the right kind of platform from which to fight and win the next election.