Team Ed Miliband desperately need discipline

By Emma Burnell / @scarletstand

I wrote some instant reaction to Miliband’s speech. Overall, my assessment was positive and I retain that. But having seen it on television as well as in the hall – well, overflow room – I think Ed’s delivery and style still need some work. But then you see the Q&A he did just the next day, and you see him at his relaxed best. So something is constraining Ed. Something is stopping him being the very best he can be. Most of that is up to Ed, of course. But the way the speech and conference played out is down to more than just Ed. So while conference has mostly left me upbeat and encouraged, this is a bit of a diatribe, an open letter to Team Ed. I promise an upbeat post straight afterwards, but here are some things that just need saying.

The root of the problem is a combination of a lack of discipline and a breakdown of courage. All the other problems stem from there. The team seems ragged and undisciplined. There isn’t coherent leadership – from the leader or anyone else – and so we get endless trailing of half-formed messages which are either rowed back from immediately or left to dangle with no support. There seemed to be a great deal of bravery in the speech on Tuesday, only for it to be weakened in the spin on Wednesday.

For God’s sake learn how to play the expectations game. Apparently before the speech, different team members were giving different messages – from speech of a generation, to Ed needs to stop doing a conference speech. Where there needed to be a coherent playing down, it felt like the only (unnamed) staffer doing so had gone rogue. You need a line and it needs to be stuck to and anyone who can’t stick to that line needs to be cut off.

Even more importantly than expectation management before the speech, there needs to be far greater discipline after the speech. If – as Mark Ferguson has reported – Ed’s team are a little too addicted to the West Wing, they are overdosing on the episode ‘Game On’, in which it is decided that post-debate spin is unnecessary, so brilliantly has their candidate done. Word has it that there was no-one in Ed’s team with the lobby hacks immediately after the speech. That was the 10 minutes in which cynical hacks – with no feed in from Ed’s people – set the agenda. Not to be there was insanity, or at the very least West Wing style idealism not grounded in the reality of modern political debate outside of the NBC studios.

Equally, the writing of the speech seems to have been a chaotic process, from what we can see of the outcome. My instant response was to the messaging, most of which I liked a lot. The stuff that’s driving the Labour right wing nuts on business was clunkily expressed, but – as Gareth Siddorn points out – fleshed out could be a really strong place for us to be, if we hold our nerve. But we need to do a better sales job on it. We need to write both soaring rhetoric and have a fleshed out argument to back it up. We don’t need to sound like we backed away from using the words “new deal” at the last minute and ran the whole speech through a find and replace search. Equally, the stuff that the Labour left is pissed off about I’m OK with too. Not least because I have been writing about the importance of ambition and the value of work for a while. But it was too buried. There were too many key themes. The speech should be shorter. It should be delivered off the cuff, by Ed and written by him, with one key fierce editor who isn’t on eggshells.

These themes of a lack of discipline and coherence and a need to either reach lofty expectation or manage them better is equally reflected in the Refounding Labour process. Ambitions for this project were high and writ large. The name alone suggests a fundamental change in the way Labour is run. But in the initial document (and throughout the process), there has been little or no talk of one issue that has got most in the way of empowering members – changes to Victoria Street. I added it to my response, and I know others’ I have spoken to did the same. But despite a promise from Ed, the submissions were never published, so we may never know how many submissions called for the same thing. Equally, we know a draft of the final document was written and eventually leaked before the closing date. That doesn’t empower members, or give them the feeling that they are due to be empowered. Again this is a discipline issue. The leadership need a head office that support and implement their ambitions. Especially when their ambition is to re-empower the membership.

Ed’s office need to change up a gear. Dammit I seem to have greater ambitions for Ed than they are currently displaying. They need to bring in people who can enforce discipline and they need to bring in people who can find a common path between his optimists who leave it to the rhetoric and the nihilists who can’t even support the vision for 48 hours.

Get it together people – you owe all of us that.