Simply Ed – holding back the sneers  

It is rude to sneer. It’s also a bad idea. Sneering reduces vision: you can’t see clearly with your face screwed up. When David Cameron became leader of the opposition Labour sneers probably prevented front-benchers from seeing the threat he represented. The Labour leadership underestimated Cameron, and it cost them.

Ed Milband has faced sneers almost from the moment the result of the 2010 leadership election was announced. The word went out immediately: wrong brother, Red Ed, what a disaster, the next election is already lost. Some critics have stuck to this line ever since. They have certainly been consistent. Their faces have been locked in a sneer for over four years. Impressive stamina, but bad for the complexion. And also pretty tiring.

Miliband’s speech at the Senate House last Thursday seems to have brought about a temporary pause, or at least diminution, in the level of sneering targeted against him. His subsequent attack on Sports Direct in Coventry at the weekend helped to sustain that pause. There may be a lesson here for the Labour leader. Standing and fighting makes it harder for the critics to make their insults stick. And tackling specific standard of living issues reaches out to ordinary voters – or “everyday people” as Miliband called them – over the heads of the media.

In a sense the Labour leader’s criticism of employment practices and low wages was a kind of sneer too – an attack on the way we live now. But as Deborah Orr warned in the Guardian on Saturday , there has to be more to Labour’s pitch than shared anxiety over our standard of living. “Everything’s shit, vote Labour” does not feel like an election winning slogan.

The final run-in to the election, which will perhaps start after the autumn statement on December 3^rd, with a short pause for Christmas, needs to be a period in which Labour sets out its positive alternative. Not reckless offers, and not funny money. But a pragmatic and plausible account of how life under a Labour government would be at least a bit better.

Voters are rightly sceptical about politicians’ claims to be able to bring about sudden and radical transformations in their lives. The Conservatives will regret making an offer of £7bn of unfunded tax cuts, just as the suggestion that the UK’s payments into the EU have been halved already look unwise. The latest Tory ploy seems to be to warn of future economic chaos, based on the belief that they will be better trusted to handle further slowdown. But it is hardly a vindication of the much-vaunted “plan” to say that lasting and widespread recovery is once again being delayed or derailed. One week Cameron claims, wrongly, to have carried out most of the cuts he had intended, the next we are staring into the economic abyss again. It is enough to give empty short-termism a bad name.

In the face of Tory diversions, Labour needs to display firmness of purpose. That will mean continuing to ignore the sneers that have accompanied Labour’s efforts in recent times. The basic task of convincing voters that a new government will help make things better – on jobs, pay, housing, energy bills, health, transport – is where the focus should lie. It may be an unglamorous and unflashy prospectus, but it must also be a relevant and believable one.

When Hugh Gaitskell’s 1962 party conference speech rejected British entry into the Common Market, his wife Dora was troubled by an aspect of the warm response his words had provoked. “The wrong people are clapping,” she said. As far as Labour is concerned the right people are sneering. And if today’s sneerers are still up at about 3am on May 8^th next year I think they will be in for a bit of a surprise, and an unwelcome stab of pain.