What if David Miliband was Labour leader?

By Emma Burnell / @scarletstand

So Dan Hodges was right. In the end, the inevitable was simply inevitable and David M was the victor. As an Ed M supporter I was – of course – disappointed at the time, but as a Labour loyalist, I’ve rallied behind the leader. David has kept us between 6 and 8 points ahead in the polls and his personal rating while low is still considerably higher than either Clegg or Cameron and higher than Cameron at this point in the electoral cycle, at a time when it is almost impossible for a leader of the opposition to be heard.

Miliband was also largely praised for Labour’s achievements in the local elections, gaining nearly 800 seats. Some cautioned that the Tories too gaining at the expense of Lib Dem collapse was the bigger result of the night but most Miliband loyalists and commentators were happy to credit him with a decent performance. The devastating result in Scotland though carried its own cautionary tale and the review being headed by Miliband’s cabinet enforcer Jim Murphy will be expected to achieve radical results.

The year has not been without its difficulties for David Miliband. His loss in the affiliates section was a difficult hurdle to overcome, given that his party remains almost wholly reliant on the unions for their funding (The generous £200k donation from Lord Sainsbury going almost entirely to fund the innovative Movement for Change programme promised during his leadership campaign). At times David has been seen as pandering too much to the unions – running in the opposite direction from his more centre-right candidature, but the pragmatism of appeasing the funder who didn’t want you is not lost on most.

David can have difficulty in reaching out to the wider membership. He has never been one to suffer fools gladly, and too often at meeting with members, his face betrays that that’s exactly who he believes he is dealing with. Ed’s campaign slogan depicting himself as the “human” speaker cut hard with David, but there is a grain of truth to it, and while David continues to command the loyalty of members, he will need to work on that with his fellow MPs – many of whom have also found him to be somewhat standoffish. It’s easily fixable, but pride should not allow it to fester.

David and his shadow chancellor Douglas Alexander have relentlessly pursued a strategy of rebuilding Labour’s economic credibility through accepting responsibility for the state of the finances at the time of the crash, limiting opposition to deficit reduction to specific briefs such as health and crime.

This has had some limited success, with Labour moving in the right direction on the key question of “who do you trust with the economy?”. However, with Greece almost constantly on the brink of default and the rest of the Eurozone not far behind, the timidity around criticism of Osborne’s austerity strategy bears considerable political risks. If Osborne succeeds, Labour may be able to claim support in national unity. If he fails, Miliband and Alexander will sadly fail with him.

This strategy has – of course – also caused tension within the shadow cabinet, with Miliband’s shadow health secretary Ed Balls (who was hoping for the shadow treasury brief) making clear his opposition to the strategy before being reined in by the whips. Balls has also let it be known that he does not favour the mooted dropping of the 50p tax rate – a rate that is popular in polls, but that Alexander and Miliband feel has become too much of a shibboleth for the Labour left .

It has been in foreign affairs where Miliband has had the greatest difficulty, placing enormous strain on his brother Ed whom he made shadow foreign secretary. While David rightly won plaudits for his statesmanlike response over the Libyan incursion, the – admittedly largely partisan in intent – endless hearings into “extraordinary rendition” have provided an endless drumbeat tying Miliband to the worst excesses of his predecessors and making it harder than ever to shake off the failed “New Labour” tag. Whether the hearings will ever actually find any evidence of wrongdoing by David is unknown. Their purpose though is purely political and to continue to drag the Labour Leader through the mud in one of the few areas where the coalition parties are still broadly in agreement. But it has exacerbated considerable tension between the two brothers, with Ed’s more liberal pronouncements examined in intricate detail by all and sundry to attempt to find implied criticism of his brother.

It was not until the summer that Miliband’s Labour got any real traction with the media. David’s close relationship with Elisabeth Murdoch meant that he wisely took a back seat over the hacking scandal and let his backbenchers Tom Watson and Chris Bryant lead the charge against the Murdochs. Watson and Bryant’s campaigning has led to a new and far more extensive police investigation of the hacking scandal, and this combined with the social media led campaign that closed the News of the World have led to the voluntary withdrawal of the BskyB bid – something unimaginable when Vince Cable used up whatever “nuclear” fuel he had flirting with undercover journalists.

But where Miliband’s leadership really came into its own was in the aftermath of the riots. Miliband has put a focus on crime at the heart of his leadership agreeing with former mentor Tony Blair abhorrence of Ken Clarke’s more liberal approach to crime. His laser-like focus on maintaining a critique of the coalition’s police cuts has paid off, and coupling that with his work with the Movement for Change to work in communities makes real the other part of Blair’s famous sound bite – M4C has a real opportunity to be part of helping Labour in communities to be tough on the causes of crime.

Overall, David has had a reasonable year. His success in keeping Labour above 40% in the polls – despite at times feeling like the invisible party has been considerable. His critics would argue that the steady as she goes attitude has denied Labour a chance to change what went so disastrously wrong at the last election, but his supporters would argue that the only thing wrong with the party then left 10 Downing street on May 11^th 2010. As ever, we can’t change the course of history, and we may never know how different the position we might be in now, as a party, as a movement and as an opposition if things had gone differently.