Official: Ed Milliband isn’t Tony Blair; so who is he then?

Ed Milliband is back in town, the town in question being Liverpool home to last week’s Labour Party conference, and he’s out to wage war on the ‘predatory asset stripping’ and the ‘fast buck culture’ that has caused a ‘quiet crisis’ in the UK. If politics were an old time western then Red Ed would be the hero in a white Stetson riding to the rescue of the nations ‘grafters.’

In his set piece speech to the party conference on Tuesday afternoon he hit out at the government’s austerity plans which are, he says, to blame for the ‘quiet crisis’ and at the political and economic settlement of the past thirty years for too often rewarding ‘not the right people with the right values, but the wrong people with the wrong values.’

People such as former care company Southern Cross and the former masters of the financial universe exemplified by the likes of ex RBS chief Sir Fred, ‘the shred’ Goodwin, to whom Gordon Brown gave first a knighthood and then rather a lot of taxpayers hard earned cash when the banking system nearly went into meltdown in 2008. These all round bad hats would be shunned in favour of companies such as Rolls Royce that actually make things rather than simply shifting money around.

He admitted that during its time in government Labour had ‘lost trust on the economy’ and pledged that under his leadership a future Labour government would ‘only spend what it can afford.’ You might think that all governments intend to do this but then tend to get blown off course and into debt by what Harold Macmillan called ‘events dear boy’, however in a world where the right wing media blames everything from the global financial crisis to it raining on the proprietor’s birthday on Labour profligacy it is a point worth making.

Ed Milliband is also in favour of a ‘new bargain’ between the government and the British public, one based on a ‘something for something’ culture where responsibility and hard work are rewarded. This would apply to those people at both ends of the economic spectrum, so no more free handouts for people on benefits and a bit more tax for the rich to pay. Not a bad idea in itself and one that resonates with the public, but it does sound a little bit ‘motherhood and apple pie.’

This wasn’t a bad speech, even though by now we know the bar set for Mr Ed isn’t all that high to start with. His delivery was as pedestrian as ever and, as his attempt to tell a joke about his recent operation to correct a deviated septum demonstrates, a second career on the stand up circuit does not beckon.

There were though several things to commend in what he said, he struck the right note between nailing the failings of New Labour and being aware of those of the more traditional wing of the party. He was also right to highlight then need for Labour to champion the building of a new type of society, one that avoids a retreat into cosy utopianism and that rejects on principle the cynical calculations of the Blair years.

The problem is that after a year in opposition Labour under Ed Milliband are still unable to articulate what that new bargain would look like when translated into reality. This is partly a result of their leader’s difficulties communicating with the lobby correspondents at Westminster let alone the wider British Public; say what you like about Saint Tony the one thing he did better than anyone else was work a room.

This inability to get over a message that should resonate powerfully with the public as the spending cuts begin to bite shows itself in the fact that when ComRes polled a thousand voters for the Independent only 24% saw Ed Milliband as a credible prime minister in waiting. That figure probably dropped even further amongst voters who heard him denying on Radio Four’s Today programme that he was ‘weird’, something floating voters in another poll conducted for Tory grandee Lord Ashcroft claimed to see him as.

This accusation in itself was rather childish, for the record all senior politicians are a little bit odd, they have to be to cope with the years of ridicule and rejection they have to go through as they climb the greasy pole. Far more damaging was the claim made by the same poll that even voters who were ‘warmly disposed’ to Labour see Ed Milliband as being ‘a blank canvas onto which they projected what were essentially hopes, or at least the benefit of the doubt.’

The real problem though is that even had Ed Milliband delivered a latter day Gettysburg Address in Liverpool this week it would have made little difference because as a means of political discourse set piece speeches made by leaders to their party conference are a busted flush. They are too carefully choreographed to make a lasting impact, it would have been more effective to have heard Ed Milliband make a shorter and more passionate speech about the three thousand BAE workers thrown on the dole this week than for him to have run through his over rehearsed paces so the massed ranks of the press could hold up score cards like this was the Olympic ice skating championships.

At the end of this year’s conference Ed Milliband is no more or less secure in his position as leader than when it started, mostly because there are no credible challengers waiting in the wings. Ed Balls would dearly love to make a grab for the crown, but made too many enemies when he was Gordon Brown’s strong arm man to have any serious backing. Yvette Cooper may make a more realistic challenge at some time in the future, but not until after the next election in all probability.

Things could be worse for the Labour Party; they have the germ of a message about change and fairness that could resonate powerfully with the electorate if only it were articulated properly. The trouble is it is hard to see how they are going to get any better with a leader who, at best, can only inspire voters to give him the ‘benefit of the doubt.’

Ask Ed- just don’t expect much in the way of an answer.

In the latest wheeze to emerge from its ‘Refounding Labour’ consultation document members of the public are to be invited to take part in a series of policy workshops taking place at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool later this month followed by a Q and A session with leader Ed Milliband. This will be paired, bizarrely, with a talent contest for sixteen to twenty four year olds with skills in music, acting, filmmaking or with an idea for a new business or invention where the prize is a paid work placement.

The open day, claimed by party insiders to be the first of its kind staged by a British political party, will cover three topics, youth opportunity, the cost of living and economic growth and building stronger communities. All worthy stuff no doubt, but hardly the sort of thing that will have people queuing around the block for tickets.

As for the talent show aspect of proceedings, that, said a party spokesperson, was designed to ‘celebrate the potential of young people;’ again this is all very worthy and a definite change from the vilification of the young as obese, benefits scroungers with an inflated sense of entitlement that has been a staple of the media coverage of the riots and their aftermath.

Earlier this week the wing of the Labour Party that still longs for Tony Blair to make a comeback was said to be ‘dismayed’ by Ed Milliband’s plan to attack David Cameron as an old style Tory grandee with little idea about how ordinary Britons live. This, they seemed to think, was evidence that Ed really was a red and any day now would be donning a donkey jacket and calling for Trident to be scrapped.

On one level you can see why the party might have been concerned by their leader’s analysis of the man he wants to replace as Prime Minister. Elections aren’t won by stating the obvious; but on the whole it seems the boys and girls in the New Labour bubble have nothing to worry about. Ed isn’t red; he’s barely even pink.

If you need evidence of this then look no further than the plan described above. Let’s just count the ways in which it can be shown to be damaging nonsense.

For a start even though he might not like to admit it Ed Milliband is the leader of a political party, an organisation that depends for its survival on having a strong grassroots membership who feel they have a stake in what their party stands for. A key part of that is being involved in making the policies they will have to go out and sell to the public on the doorstep. Inviting people with no link to the Labour Party and who might not even vote for it at the next election to take part in the process makes a mockery of the commitment shown by ordinary members without whom there wouldn’t be a party for Ed Millibad to lead.

It is also far from clear what real impact these chit-chats will actually have on policy. Participation will be so tightly controlled by the party’s full time organisers, a paranoid bunch at the best of times, that anyone with anything remotely controversial to say will be ruthlessly weeded out. All that will be produced will be a pile of spoilt flip charts and a neatly ticked box marked ‘engagement’, allowing the party to scamper on down the road to disaster in the way it had been planning to all along.

There is also something deeply patronising about the fact that it is deemed necessary to include a spurious talent show element in proceedings. It is almost as if the hierarchy of what used to be the people’s party now think the people will only pay attention to things if they are a bit like the X Factor.

Worst of all this whole sorry performance will bring us no clearer to understanding what the Labour Party stands for. Have lessons been learnt from their defeat in May 2010 and the slow crumbling of its core support that has taken place over the preceding two decades?

The one thing it does tell us is what a Labour government led by if not Ed then by one of the members of the shadow cabinet waiting patiently for him to slip off the narrow ledge over a bottomless pit that is leadership of a political party in its first term out of office would be like. It would be the same sorry New Labour story, all focus groups and spin; endless initiatives and targets hiding a deep dislike of the party membership and a patronising approach towards the wider voting public that we came to know so well and like so little from 1997 onwards.

If the best Ed Milliband and his shadow cabinet can come up with after almost a year spent gazing into their collective navels is to turn the party conference, a body that should be about giving grassroots members a voice in the making of its policies, into a tawdry talent show; then perhaps it is time the membership responded in kind by not voting them through to the next round.

Labour- the next generation.

New Labour is dead actually it died in May, but the death certificate didn’t arrive until this week. It was delivered by new party leader Ed Milliband in his first major speech.

Speaking from the platform at the party conference in Manchester on Tuesday he praised Labour’s achievements in power, but said the party had ‘painful truths’ to learn about why it had lost the election and with it the trust of the public.

These truths included failing to regulate the banks, sabotaging civil liberties in the fight against terrorism and, most of all, taking the country to war in Iraq. Mr Milliband said ‘we were wrong. Wrong to take Britain to war and we need to be honest about that, a statement that didn’t meet with the unquestioning support of older brother David, who was caught by the TV cameras whispering something less than complementary to deputy leader Harriet Harman.

Mr Milliband the younger also hit out at claims that he was in the pocket of the unions, saying he would have ‘no truck with overblown rhetoric about waves of irresponsible strikes’, cue footage of Tony Woodley looking less than delighted. Ed Milliband, went the implied message, isn’t ‘their’ man, he isn’t anybody’s man apart from his own.

He also joked about the ‘Red Ed’ tag attached to him over the weekend by the right wing media, calling for cheap jibes to be replaced by a ‘grown up debate’ on political issues. Labour on his watch, he said would have ‘different attitudes, different ideas, different ways of doing politics.’ It would be diametrically opposed to the ‘miserable, pessimistic view of what we can do’ to combat the deficit being propagated by the Coalition. Labour were, he said, ‘the optimists and together we will change Britain.’

The delivery was a million miles away from the showmanship used by Tony Blair in years gone by, or his surprising heir Nick Clegg only last week come to that. At times it tipped over into the sort of earnestness you might expect from the captain of a sixth form debating society, but it took courage to admit that Iraq was a mistake and he showed a touch of humour that was a welcome change from the neurotic gloom of the Brown years.

It would, perhaps, be unkind to be too critical of what was a rather underpowered keynote speech, great political speeches, unlike say great pop songs aren’t written on the hoof. Ed Milliband had just seventy two hours in which to prepare for his big moment and it showed.

That said he did strike the right note by saying that Labour has to learn hard lessons and find a new direction if the party ever hopes to return to power. The question is what should that direction be?

It would be dangerously comforting for Ed Milliband to listen too closely to the siren voices telling him that what the party needs is more of the same, a newer New Labour if you like. The spin and cynicism of the Blair/Brown years has proved itself to be anathema to party members and public alike.

There is little call for Labour to return to the inward looking squabbles over arcane points of dogma that were a feature of their failure to engage in discourse with the wider voting public during the 1980’s. Ed can though afford to be redder than he thinks, at least he can if he can persuade the voters that Labour is committed to fairness and has a viable alternative to cutting services to the bone.

As first conferences in opposition go fortune has looked more kindly on the Labour Party than it might have done. It was certainly an improvement on last year’s awful train wreck which saw the Sun abandon its support for the party.

Despite the embarrassment of having the former Foreign Secretary David Milliband bow out of front line politics, for now at least, only hours after he made his first big speech having a new leader in place should give Labour a much needed fillip in the polls and, maybe, a renewed sense of purpose. How long either will last once the frivolity of the conference season is over and the hard work of being in opposition starts in earnest is anyone’s guess.

Has Labour lost it?

The Labour Party has ‘lost the will to live’ and resembles nothing so much as a football team that desperately needs to raise its game to avoid being relegated from the Premiership, said Chancellor Alistair Darling on the eve of the party conference in Brighton this week.

He may well have been speaking figuratively, but his comments still cast a dark shadow over the conference that no amount of brave talk from the podium was able to dispel.

This was the week when the party leadership hoped to inspire the rank and file membership to face what Business Secretary Peter Mandelson called ‘the fight of our lives’, or, more accurately for their political lives as an Ipsos Mori poll conducted on the day Gordon Brown made his keynote speech put Labour in third place on 24% for the first time since 1982. That may have been the intention; the reality was that the conference merely paraded on a very public stage the problems Labour has struggled with for the past two years.

The largest of these problems is the leadership style of Gordon Brown; despite his notorious difficulties with communicating with party and public alike his previous two conference speeches have been successful enough to give his approval ratings a short term boost. In the first he managed to convince starry eyed party activists and cynical media hacks alike that he really did represent a change from the politics of spin and sound bytes, in the second he saw off the challenge to his leadership presented by David Milliband and Harriet Harman.

The lift both speeches provided was, of course, only temporary, in 2007 he flunked calling the general election that would have given him a real mandate to govern and after the 2008 speech came a year of scandals, slip ups and increasingly odd behaviour that overshadowed his expert handling of the financial crisis. This time there was no discernable lift at all and the speech that could have bought the party a little much needed breathing space only served to add to their problems.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Having Brown’s wife Sarah introduce his speech, a big success last year mostly because she seemed to be almost the only un-spun individual in the entire conference hall, fell flat this time round because after a year of being photographed with Michelle Obama and Bono Mrs Brown no longer resembles a wife thrust into the limelight to stand up for her misunderstood husband so much as yet another cynical PR operator trying to work the crowd.

Brown’s delivery also fell flat, his call for party activists to ‘dream big and watch our country soar’, sounded cheesy and unconvincing delivered by a man who had spent much of the week having whether or not he needs anti-depressants to get him through the day debated by the media. The Prime Minister did his cause no favours on the day after his big speech by exhibiting signs of extreme stress when he stormed out of an interview with Sky’s Adam Boulton, for him at least, it seems, the dream long ago turned into a nightmare.

Brown’s speech also demonstrated another problem faced by Labour, too many policies and too little idea of how they might be delivered on before the next election. He announced, amongst a slew of other plans and initiatives, ten hours of free child care for families on ‘modest incomes’, a £1 billion ‘innovation fund’ to help businesses during the recession and, most controversially a plan to house teenage single mothers in shared houses rather than council flats where they would be given support and parenting advice by social services. Few of these announcements were new, how they might be paid for in a time of severe constraints on the public purse was a mystery, but still they came pouring out in the hope that one might catch the public mood and deflect a little of the criticism being heaped upon his beleaguered government.

Traditionally party conferences in the run up to an election are an opportunity for the leadership to stiffen the sinews of their troops ahead of the trials to come; at least they are for parties with a decent shot of winning. For Labour this week was something else, it was an unwelcome confirmation of what they knew all along, the party is exhausted by twelve years in government, bereft of fresh ideas and deeply unhappy within itself. Like a battered heavyweight it may yet claw itself upright using the ropes, but will only be knocked down again.

Symbolic of Labour’s declining fortunes was the decision taken by the Sun newspaper, the in house journal of the UK’s ‘white van men’, to withdraw the support it has given to the party at every election since 1997.

Party veteran Margaret Beckett said the Sun’s change of allegiance was a ‘problem’, but not an ‘insurmountable’ one, union boss Tony Woodley ripped up a copy of the paper on the conference platform and won a standing ovation and, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Gordon Brown said ‘In the end we like the support of every newspaper, you’d like to have the support of lots of people that are not giving you support, but it is people that decide elections.’

However brave the tune there no doubt that Gordon Brown et al are still whistling in the dark. The Murdoch press may have less power to influence public opinion that it would like us to believe, but it has a near unswerving accuracy when it comes to reflecting what the public think. As the Sun’s headline ran on Wednesday morning ‘Labour has lost it’. Lost touch with the public mood, lost touch with its core values and, it looks ever more likely, lost the next election.