You would barely know from most of the coverage that Labour continues to lead the polls by several points, despite the much-vaunted economic recovery, or that Ed Miliband’s most unpopular policies with the media are highly popular with the public or that Margaret Thatcher’s ratings lagged well behind Jim Callaghan’s when she was elected prime minister. It is not that Miliband does not have a communication problem or a struggle to connect with the working class voters Labour needs, in particular, to win back. He clearly does — although the idea that his brother, David, would have escaped similar ridicule as an out-of-touch geek if he had won the leadership cannot be taken seriously, quite apart from his links to some of the most discredited parts of New Labour’s record.
The problem for those leading the onslaught on Miliband is almost the opposite. Their worry is not that the Labour leader will take his party to certain defeat. Their fear is that, with Labour’s parliamentary boundary advantage and a little help from Ukip, he may actually win. In fact, they are quite open about their anxieties.
“He may be weird, but the way things are going, he may also be prime minister,” the Daily Mail warned readers last week. And it is not just the right-wing press that feels that way. “We better hope” that the voters “won’t have Ed”, one New Labour veteran told Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times. “If he won, it would set the party back 20 years.”
Along with the City, they have all got a gripe with Miliband. Murdoch is certainly out to get the man who demanded the breakup of his media empire after the hacking scandal. Corporate wealth extractors cannot abide his calls to split their lucrative cartels, while Blairite and Brownite diehards regard his enthusiasm for intervening in markets as a reckless affront to contemporary Britain’s powers that be.
Miliband is charged with being “anti-business” and “anti-aspirational”. From the Independent newspaper and City financiers to New Labour veterans like Lords Myners and Mandelson and shadow cabinet operators such as Ed Balls and Chris Leslie, the demand is that Labour must be more “pro-business” for which read “pro-corporate”.
Corporate barons complain that while Balls and the shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, are “well-regarded in corporate circles” — the shadow chancellor has been staging a rearguard action against bringing rail back into public ownership the Labour leader seems impervious to their “clout”. Note that this charge of Labour being “anti-business” is not one that resonates with voters, who want politicians to be “tougher” with big business. In fact, far from regarding Miliband as too left-wing, large majorities back Labour’s commitment to an energy price freeze and controls on rent and corporate takeovers, and would go further on nationalisation. It is private vested interests that cannot abide by him. And while he is derided as weak, Miliband has started to challenge those interests in a way no leading British politician has for a generation — just as he played the decisive role in parliament’s refusal to launch a disastrous attack on Syria last summer.
If you put together some of Labour’s commitments, they certainly point to a different kind of government from those run by Tony Blair or Gordon Brown — from an energy price freeze and pledge to build 200,000 homes a year to the breakup of the banks and creation of a national investment bank, a mansion tax and private rent cap, tougher low wage and agency work protection, and repeal of the bedroom tax and the Health and Social Care Act.
However, there is also the Miliband who is photographed with the Sun, struggles to find a strike he will not condemn, backs benefit sanctions on the young and has signed up to austerity and cuts that risk undermining economic reconstruction and hitting Labour supporters hardest, while failing to appease the city or the media.
Mixed messages and triangulation feed the sense that the Westminster elite are all part of the same game and sap the credibility of commitments that break with the past. Miliband’s caution and equivocation partly stem from his lack of support in the shadow cabinet and parliament and a determination to maintain party unity at all costs.
But they also reflect the fact that he himself is a product of New Labour politics and has failed to mobilise his own base. As one prominent Labour figure puts it, Miliband has broken with New Labour “intellectually but not emotionally, or as a way of doing business”. In any case, the idea that Labour must return to its city and corporate featherbedding ways to succeed is nonsensical. Slavish “pro-business” politics are what gave us the crash of 2008, rampant labour market insecurity, years of falling living standards and runaway inequality.
Labour right-wingers and Tories who argue that there can be no redistribution without wealth creation are of course right, but they blithely ignore the fact that wealth is not being created under the existing broken economic model. Private corporations are not investing, productivity is stagnating, the economy is not being rebalanced and George Osborne has triggered some growth only by pumping up credit and house prices. Four years into the coalition, wages are still falling in real terms — a crucial reason why Labour is still in a strong position to be the largest party after the next election.
Only publicly-led investment and intervention in markets that are not delivering can overcome that failure. That should also shape the broader political message Labour needs to turn Miliband’s shopping list of policies into a story about where it wants to take the country.
Sustainable growth, social justice and security — of jobs, housing and incomes — would be a start. Those are today’s aspirations for the majority. It is a cliche that Miliband succeeds when he is bold and flounders when he hedges and triangulates. Right now, that means bringing to heel the briefers and rivals who would take Labour backwards and turning the tables on his media tormentors. The public may even get the message.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
