Blog:Little Ed Takes The Helm
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Dewey Ide, Labour Correspondent, 26th September 2010
The Labour Party has eventually elected its new leader, Ed Miliband. Have they made a mistake?
The difficulty for the Tories in Opposition was that whoever they elected was up against Tony Blair. Whatever you think of Blair, it wasn’t for nothing his nickname was Teflon Tony. Undoubtedly charismatic, he won an incredible three elections in a row for Labour and the party lost when it dumped him and put sour-faced megalomaniac Brown in charge. Those are the uncomfortable facts. I like the Frankie Boyle gag about the debate over whether Thatcher should have a State Funeral: the only question is whether she has to be dead first. Nevertheless Thatcher too was charismatic, in a way I personally never got, and wiped the floor with sub-standard Labour leaders. When Thatcher was ousted Major barely clung onto power at the next election and when he came up against Blair the Tories were decimated so badly it has taken a Coalition to restore a Tory to Downing Street 13 years later even when up against the least popular Government in my lifetime.
The advantage for Little Ed is that Cameron is not a leader on the scale of Thatcher or Blair; no such heavyweight leader is in evidence in today’s House of Commons unless you count some venerable pensioners like Ken Clarke whose ambitions for the PM position have long since expired. The disadvantage is that he himself is no Thatcher or Blair. We live in a time of boring and uninspiring leadership, evidenced by the lack of either positive or negative passion. Do you love Cameron or hate him? I doubt you feel much one way or another. Same with Little Ed I suspect. The lack of charismatic leadership means that electors tend to stick with their traditional party allegiances and are not swayed by the personal appeal of the leader. In May 2010 this meant that no one party could generate a majority.
Blair’s brilliance was to take the Labour Party into the centre ground, pushing the Tories to the right and making the Lib Dems seem more left-wing than Labour. Cameron’s brilliance was to take a party with negative right wing connotations and go into a stable coalition with a party perceived to be to the left of politics. They now straddle right across the left-right political spectrum giving Labour very little room to manoeuvre. It is interesting that as someone who made a contribution to Labour victory in 1997 that went considerably beyond the loan of a vote my politics haven’t changed but my vote is now firmly with the Lib Dems and the Coalition.
Little Ed is a compromise leader, as his big brother, David, would also have been. The Labour Party is not going to move on with a Brownite intellectual at the helm. Watching Little Ed speak is more effective than Mogadon at encouraging a snooze. It is John Major without the appeal of the “ordinary guy”. Major, it must be remembered, won the 1992 election by getting up on a soapbox in the street and showing his roots as one of the proletariat. By selecting a leader the Party thinks will appeal to the left wing, as well as the middle classes who will see him as a posh intellectual, and the younger voter since he looks like he has recently left school, what they have actually got is a diluted effect across the board. The centre ground has a new squatter in the form of the Coalition, and Labour will have a hell of a time claiming it back.
Odd as it might seem, from an electoral perspective the right candidate would have been Diane Abbott. Her left-wing credentials would have been manageable in the reality of leadership and electoral strategy. I dare say I would have disagreed with her on virtually every policy but I would still vote for her to be Prime Minister, and that is what ultimately matters to a political party. Why? Because she is different, has a sense of humour, seems to have difficulty doing party spin with a straight face, and what you see is what you get. I trust her. She was not associated with the outgoing Government as the other candidate were and seemed equally anti-Blair and anti-Brown, which would have ended that division immediately. Andy Burnham, the ordinary guy with the Scouse accent, only peripheral association with the failure of the last Government, and no Brown/Blair divisiveness would also have been a far more astute long-term choice. With Little Ted I have no idea what I might get other than a Brown-mentored member of a failed Government, and I therefore cannot trust him an inch. So am likely to stick with the devil I know in power, which is why incumbent governments generally have an advantage.
Policy is one area where Little Ed wants to make a difference. What most people are forgetting at the moment is that whilst Labour rants over cuts to public services, the cuts going on right now are Labour’s cuts. Redundancies in the civil service, and local authority budget reductions were set long ago, before the election. The Coalition are not making anything of this at the moment because if the cuts are effective they will claim credit. Remember that Liam Byrne, outgoing Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury left a note for his successor that said: “Dear Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck! Liam”
Commentators are asking what strategy Little Ed will take on the economy and cuts. Will he opt for supporting the Darling Plan or the slower path or no cuts view of his union backing. Who actually cares? The Coalition is now widely expected to last the course and be there in 5 years time. By this time the pain should be largely over, we will have an entirely different economic landscape, and the people have already decided that they don’t want the Labour approach to the economy because their policies got us into the mire in the first place. Note to Labour – your economic credibility is shot to pieces, the people rejected your ideas on fixing the economy, your arguments are lost, move on. Don’t oppose for the sake of opposition. Instead, reject the ideas the majority of the population have already rejected, and construct a positive alternative policy. Consider this, the voters told you they didn’t want your policies and took your ability to implement them away for 5 years. Pursuing rejected and failed policies will reinforce a perception of a rejected and failed party. And this is why someone like Diane Abbott would have been the best choice of leader because a radical change of style and substance would instantly remove the stigma of failure.
The Tories were out of power until all the discredited and unpopular ministers from the Major administration had been sidelined. Hague and Clarke are the only survivors and both remained personally popular through the years. 5 years will not be enough for us to forget the mess Labour left so if the same guilty faces touting the same failed policies are asking for us to put them back into power in 2015 they are liable to suffer the same fate the Tories did for 3 elections in a row. I can’t see any way that Little Ed is going to get me, and my demographic which is far more important, to return to Labour, so to answer the original question, his election as leader is a most decisive mistake.
© Evrose, 2012
