Who will split the splitters? SDP lessons for “True Labour”

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Will Labour split if/when Jeremy Corbyn retains the party leadership? Should it split? And if it does, along what lines? Who would be the target voters for any new centre-left party?

A lot has been written about all this in recent weeks, such as this Economist piece arguing that an anti-Corbyn “True Labour” offshoot could do better than nervous Labour MPs fear. However, Danny Finkelstein contributed a useful perspective in yesterday’s Times, based on his experience on the national executive of the SDP back in the 1980s.

What I hadn’t previously appreciated is that the SDP was, from the start, divided along a faultline that still afflicts Labour: between the regional working class and metropolitan liberals. This division was personified, in the SDP, by the conflicting ambitions of David Owen and Roy Jenkins.

As Finkelstein writes:

Owen’s conception of the SDP, which was formed in 1981, is that it would be a tough-minded, hawkish party of the left. It would appeal to an aspirational working class, particularly in the north, who had tired of bureaucratic socialism and saw the point of Margaret Thatcher, but were not Tories.

When the future Labour foreign secretary was a student working on a building site he had been struck by the reaction of his fellow workers to the Suez crisis. It had been instinctively nationalist, uninterested in political protocol, and robust. It was these people he wanted the SDP to appeal to.

In the metropolitan liberal corner, by contrast, was Roy Jenkins, who had been President of the European Commission immediately before returning to the UK to set up the SDP:

Roy Jenkins, former Labour chancellor but also biographer of the Liberal prime minister HH Asquith, wanted a centre party that reflected his own liberal instinct. This would be a southern party of the middle class, disdainful of Thatcher, fastidious rather than bulldog-like on international issues, avowedly centrist.

As Finkelstein points out, by the end of 1982 Jenkins had won the battle:

The SDP would be a liberal party. It lost almost all its northern and working-class seats, was not able to compete in the south because the Liberal Party took all the best constituencies, and ended up being swallowed up by its partner.

The same quandary that faced the SDP faces Labour now, especially post-Brexit: should it stand up for “the 48%”, even if this costs it votes in the English regions? Or should it tilt towards a more eurosceptic line, opposing unrestricted freedom of movement, for example? Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith are both attempting to square this circle (“get you a party that can do both!”), neither especially convincingly.

It would face a new party of “True Labour” splitters even more acutely. Do they follow the siren calls to form a “progressive alliance” with Greens and Lib Dems, thus doubling down on the middle-class liberal vote, or do they risk alienating liberals by pursuing the traditional Labour base, much of which remains (as Finkelstein describes it):

conservative on constitutional questions, culturally sentimental and nostalgic, cautious on issues of individual freedom, opposed to mass immigration, monarchist, nationalist, patriotic and militaristic.

Of course, the only way Labour (or any new party) can win is the way it has always won: by managing to hold together its uneasy coalition of working class traditionalists and middle class liberals. This coalition has come under so much strain in recent decades that it’s hard to see how Labour can reinvigorate; harder still to see how a new party would rebuild such a coalition from scratch. As Finkelstein concludes:

Neil Sedaka was wrong. Breaking up is not very hard to do. It’s easy to disassemble a political alliance. It’s putting one together that is challenging.

Jeremy Corbyn and his friends

Well, no sooner have I nailed my colours to Jeremy Corbyn’s mast than I began (belatedly) to engage properly with the most serious reason not to vote for him: his choices of friends over the years.

A friend sent me a link to this article by Alan Johnson (note: not the MP of the same name), in which Johnson condemns Corbyn’s support for “the vicious antisemitic Islamist”, Raed Salah. Salah’s quoted comments include the following:

We have never allowed ourselves, and listen well, we have never allowed ourselves to knead the bread for the breaking of the fast during the blessed month of Ramadan with the blood of children. And if someone wants a wider explanation, you should ask what used to happen to some of the children of Europe, whose blood would be mixed in the dough of the holy bread. God Almighty, is this religion? Is this what God wants? God will confront you for what you are doing.

Both the authenticity and interpretation of this quotation have been contested. However, as a UK immigration appeals tribunal put it (albeit while overturning Theresa May’s decision to exclude Salah from the UK), “we do not find this comment could be taken to be anything other than a reference to the blood libel against Jews.” For Jeremy Corbyn to share a platform with a promulgator of the blood libel, of all things, strikes me as a serious error of judgement on his part. I can well understand why Johnson would regard this as a “deal-breaker”.

James Bloodworth sets out similar concerns, and suggests that what he describes as Corbyn’s “indulgence of tyranny” is the result of seeing the US as “the world’s most malevolent power”:

Thus because the US is the beating heart of capitalism, it must always and everywhere be the “root cause” (you will hear that phrase a lot) of the world’s problems; and by deduction, any movement that points a gun in its direction must invariably have something going for it.

All these are serious allegations being made against Corbyn from people on the political left. They deserve a serious response from him, which I hope they’ll get. As I commented on Twitter earlier, had I not been a Labour party member, these allegations would probably have been enough to put me off paying my £3 to vote in the election.

However, I am a Labour party member, and thus I can’t just consider Corbyn in the abstract, but in a context where I either have to vote for one of the other candidates or abstain altogether. And this response to Bloodworth from Sacha Ismail argues that Corbyn’s undoubted failures on this front (such as his “wrong and politically harmful comments about Hamas”) have to be put into the context both of the Labour contest as a whole, and (even more importantly) Corbyn’s more constructive actions during his career.

As Ismail observes:

It is not as if the other three candidates have a good record on international issues. On the contrary, they have all been complicit in New Labour’s appalling record.

And there is an important difference: Corbyn’s view of peace and international human rights is flawed, but he has one. The approaches the others take are decisively shaped by what they judge politically acceptable for a careerist bourgeois politician. […] Elect Burnham, Cooper or Kendall and the crawling to Saudi Arabia will continue!

The anti-war left has been (in many cases rightly) criticised by people such as Nick Cohen for turning its back on the victims of “anti-US” regimes — especially women and trade unionists. Corbyn, however, does have a track record of offering support, as Ismail describes:

Last year, when Workers’ Liberty was collecting signatures for the campaign to free jailed Iranian trade unionists Shahrokh Zamani and Reza Shahabi, there was a week in which I grabbed two Labour MPs at meetings and asked them to sign. One was Alison McGovern (now supporting Liz Kendall), who looked irritated and said she’d have to look into it. The other was Corbyn, who signed without hesitation and told me to contact his office for more help.

Ismail concludes that Corbyn’s failings do not “cancel out the huge possibilities his campaign offers for breaking the Blairite blockade of working-class politics.”

And yes: Sacha Ismail is writing for Workers’ Liberty, a Trotskyite organisation. Caveat lector and all that. But I think he still makes some valid points in Corbyn’s defence (or at least mitigation).

Here’s another post that addresses the main accusations being made against Jeremy Corbyn by his opponents. I’m unpersuaded by the defence offered in respect of Raed Salah (the writer claims that the “blood libel” quotations were “doctored”; I prefer to accept the immigration tribunal’s conclusions on the subject). Also, while the post defends Corbyn from the charge of being himself antisemitic (which I’m quite sure he’s not), the more widespread, credible and serious accusation is that he has been too willing to turn a blind eye to the antisemitism of some of those with whom he allies himself. The post does, however, offers some robust defences to accusations that Corbyn is pro-Putin, pro-IRA and soft on child abuse.

But to return to the accusation of cosying up to antisemites: as I said above, I can well understand why people would turn against Corbyn over his support for Raed Safah. I am deeply dismayed by it myself, and hope that Corbyn can offer a convincing explanation (and dissociation).

In the meantime, given that my choices as they stand are (a) vote for Corbyn; (b) vote for Cooper, Burnham or Kendall; or (c) abstain (and, to be frank, probably resign from the party altogether), for now I remain a wary supporter of Corbyn for the leadership – though I’m probably going to leave it for a week or two before returning my ballot paper, to see how this plays out. But assuming he becomes leader, his approach to “reactionary anti-Western movements and governments” will need to be watched carefully, and opposed vigorously if he slips back into a “diplomatic soft-soaping” of the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and Raed Salah.

Update (18 Aug): it’s worth watching Jeremy Corbyn’s response to the allegations about Raef Salah and Peter Eisen in this interview with Cathy Newman:

Hilary Wainwright on supporting Jeremy Corbyn

I liked Hilary Wainwright’s Red Pepper article on Jeremy Corbyn enough to revive this blog. Wainwright is one of many on the left who have paid their £3 to vote for Corbyn, not as a “knight in shining armour”, but because he is

one of a modest band of Labour MPs, building on the tradition of Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone, who don’t ask to see your party card before joining struggles and debates beyond the walls of Westminster.

Unlike Wainwright, I remain a (somewhat grumpy and disaffected) member of the Labour party. However, I think Wainwright’s analysis of the current political situation has a lot going for it.

The strongest part of her analysis comes when she describes how voting for Corbyn shouldn’t be seen as an attempt to turn the Labour party into “a genuinely socialist party”, but as a response to economic and political changes that have made Labour’s style of social democracy untenable:

The economic and political conditions for social democracy no longer exist. The prevarications of both Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham are indications of this. Their goals are social democratic but the world of a mixed economy, where the profits of a productive capitalist sector could be taxed and redistributed to provide universal welfare, social security and a public infrastructure for the benefit of all, no longer exists.

Instead, we live in a world dominated by a “financialised global capitalism”, in which “social democracy as we have known it is visibly too weak to be an effective champion of social justice.” Hence the declines experienced by European social democratic parties ranging from Pasok in Greece to the German SPD, French Socialists and British Labour party. All these parties depended, during the post-war era, on a Keynesian economic consensus based on

productive capital, the aspiration of full employment, decent wages and social security (hence a strong market for the goods produced), taxable profits and a nationally regulated currency and trade.

All this has been replaced, Wainwright argues, by a neoliberal order in which “making profits out of producing things” has been supplanted by “making money out of money.” In that world, the old tools of parliamentary social democracy are of limited effect:

The levers of national governmental power have either become useless in the face of global financial flows (for example, to tax corporations or combat tax avoidance) or, in the case of the EU, international treaties block state intervention in the market or use debt to prevent radical governments from using the powers they could have (as with Greece).

The only politics that is possible in the face of this is one that “seeks to mobilise all possible sources of counter-power.” Simply aiming to form an elected national government “is simply not sufficient” – though gaining such power can certainly play an importance role in “the full realisation of people’s transformative capacities.”

This then leads Wainwright on to the section of her essay that resonated most strongly with me:

What I would stress is the need to abandon purisms and single perspective politics – whether pure anarchism, pure parliamentarism, pure syndicalism or any one-track approach – and instead to urge a hybrid and experimental politics where collaboration is the guiding method.

I find that my own political views are a shifting mixture of perspectives ranging from quasi-anarchism to social democracy to (whisper it) elements of so-called “Blue Labour” thinking­ – often reflecting the tension between what I’d ideally like to see happen versus the need and chance to make things a bit better right now, even if this falls a long way short of the ideal or even comes with some distasteful accretions. (This is why I continue to maintain that, had the Labour leadership election offered a candidate from the Labour centre or even the Labour right who I believed could win an election, I’d have voted for them over Corbyn).

Hence, for Wainwright, the politics that is needed in a post-Keynesian, post-social democratic world is “less about demands on government, more about grassroots transformation”:

Hence a movement as much about popular education and self-education as about winning elections; that is less about faction fights and more about welcoming diversity and creating space for reflection and debate, treating practice as experimental action from which to learn; an organisation, then, that is less of a central hierarchy and vanguard, more a platform connecting and supporting and interconnecting struggles.

Hence her support for Corbyn, who she sees as “a good kind of leader … for this kind of plural and non-hierarchical organisation.” This is not about rallying behind a “charismatic leader”, but about supporting someone with a track record of “weaving a web of networks”, who can see that “something new is going on, transcending traditional political allegiances.” She concludes:

We are supporting someone who has no desire to be the leader but is willing to offer his energies and legitimacy as an MP as a resource for a movement that can self-consciously create a truly transformative politics, inside and outside the Labour Party and based on principles of self‑governing democracy.

I wonder whether Corbyn, if he becomes Labour leader, will be able to live up to these expectations – given the nature of that role, coupled with the civil war likely to erupt in the party from day one of his leadership. My own reasons for voting for Corbyn are less well-formed and less hopeful: more an angry kick aimed at a defeated and intellectually bankrupt party, in the hope that at least some of the resulting destruction proves to be of the creative variety. However, Wainwright’s article is a reminder that a “best-case scenario” for a Corbyn leadership is, as Seamus McCauley puts it, an escape from the “consensus” and “status quo bias” into which British politics has slipped. In Wainwright’s words:

an opportunity to get out of a political trap into a space for debate and new radical thinking.

All that said: I wonder whether Labour will even allow Wainwright to vote…

The Big Society has spoken…

Well, congratulations to Ed Miliband on being elected Labour leader, and congratulations (I think!) to the Labour party for taking such a high-risk (but potentially high-reward) course of action. I’m not going to pretend I’m free from trepidation – quite the opposite – but I do think Ed made a solid start in his acceptance speech, and perhaps my fears about his ability to find the right tone will (as I’d hoped) prove unfounded.

Ed is of course already being attacked as “the unions’ choice”, thanks to the fact the only section of the electoral college in which he came first was the Affiliates section. But it’s worth taking a look at the actual voting results to see what has actually happened.

First, a total of 338,374 people voted in this election. I don’t know if that’s a record for a party leadership election, but it’s pretty impressive. Of those, 266 were MPs, 126,874 were Labour party members – and 211,234 were members of trades unions and affiliated societies.

Contrary to the perception which the Tories (aided and abetted by the media) will be assiduously seeking to promote, there is not a single “union block vote” to be found: those 211,234 Affiliate votes were mostly from ordinary working people who pay voluntary political contributions along with their union dues. If anything, that section of the electoral college is the one that most reflects the wider electorate. The Tories like to talk about the “Big Society”: well, the trades unions are Britain’s largest voluntary organisations, and here are hundreds of thousands of their members engaging in politics as individuals. It’s the Big Society that has made Ed Miliband leader.

Does this result mean that Ed Miliband is in the pocket of the trades unions? At the very least, he’s likely to engineer some sort of minor confrontation with the unions in the near future to counter suggestions that he is beholden to them. More fundamentally (and more constructively), the fact that he’s been voted in by ordinary union members, rather than by union bosses, could well be a means for him to assert himself against union leaders: “You didn’t vote for me; your members voted for me, and I’m going to act in their interests rather than yours.”

As for claims that union members blindly follow their leaderships’ guidance: in 1994, union leaderships recommended that their members vote against Tony Blair, but 52% voted for him.

Let’s be honest, though: the “voted in by the unions” millstone is going to be hung round Ed’s neck by the Tories and the media, and his first big test as leader is going to be how he avoids being defined by this.

The other threat to Ed Miliband is the narrowness of the result. However, even there the 50.65% to 49.35% result thrown out by the complexities of the electoral college belies the fact that in terms of total votes, Ed beat David by 175,519 votes to 147,220. In other words, 28,299 more people voted for Ed than for David.

I haven’t been able to find figures yet for the total 1st & 2nd preferences cast for each candidate (as we don’t know how Ed and David’s second preferences went), but YouGov’s last poll suggested that 43% of party members voting for David Miliband as first preference then put Ed Miliband as their second preference. Sunder Katwala observes that 66% of party members will have voted for Ed as first or second preference, which gives him a solid mandate among party members. (Ed was my second preference.)

I haven’t had time to run the numbers yet, but it looks like Ed will also have a solid majority of MPs and MEPs voting for him as first or second preference. (Update: by my reckoning, Ed got 78 MPs’ first preferences and 70 second preferences, giving him the first or second preferences of 148 MPs, 58% of the total. Contrast Iain Duncan Smith – the last party leader generally reckoned to have been imposed on his MPs against their wishes – who only achieved 32% of Tory MPs’ final-ballot votes in the 2001 leadership election. So, once again contrary to what certain Tories and sections of the media are already saying, Ed is no IDS Mark II on these figures.)

Bottom line: despite what the Tories and the media will say, this is not about union leaders imposing Ed Miliband on MPs and the rest of the Labour party. Ed Miliband may not have been my first choice in the end, but he’s got a wide mandate from across the Labour movement. It’s up to him, now, what he makes of it and how he establishes himself as leader.

If Ed wins…

There seems to be a growing consensus that Ed Miliband is going to win the Labour leadership (Guido Fawkes reports he’s the “bookies’ favourite”). Obviously we won’t know for sure until tomorrow afternoon (unless there’s a leak – anyone fancy starting a sweepstake on when? 😉 ), but Mike Smithson gives a fairly convincing analysis here of why MiliE may well edge it.

As I’ve said before, if this were a campaign to choose a policy platform, Ed Miliband would be my first preference. However, I’m still afraid that David Cameron will find it all-too easy to make mincemeat of him, not least if he can be painted as “everybody’s second preference, nobody’s first (except the unions’)”.

That said, if Ed Miliband can get through the artillery barrage from right-wing newspapers and bloggers over the next few weeks without ending up being perceived as a combination of Michael Foot, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith (read: electorally-toxic activists’ favourite) then there are a number of ways in which he could be very good for the party. Here are a few that spring to mind:

• He will have a better chance of freeing Labour from the baggage of Iraq and its dreadful record on civil liberties in government (post-2001 – let’s never forget that New Labour pre-2001 was the party of the Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act, of restoration of union rights at GCHQ and so on).
• He’s more likely than David to make Ed Balls shadow chancellor: surely a complete no-brainer of an appointment, but one which you get the impression David Miliband is inclined to avoid if possible.
• He has a ruthless streak (as evidenced by today’s Guardian front page) that is perhaps lacking in David, and which will do him no harm in taking on the Tories (and indeed in establishing his authority within the Labour party).
• If he can get Labour into government (and that, for me, is still the overwhelming big if), it has the potential to be a better Labour government than we’d have under David – one which is more committed to increasing equality and opposing the encroachment of the market into our lives. If there’s one thing the first months of the new government is showing, it’s that the Tories are far more effective at using government to drive through radical change than were New Labour. At this rate, the next Labour government, even if we get back in by 2015, will be forced to rebuild social democracy pretty much from the ground up, rather than cautiously defending its (by then non-existent) remnants.

So, we’ll see. If David turns out to be the winner, I’ll be relieved but perhaps a little uninspired. If Ed wins, I’ll be more fearful – bluntly, I’ll feel like we’ve just condemned ourselves to a decade or more of opposition – but at the same time hoping that he can prove my fears wrong.

David v Ed: weighing the evidence

Before reaching my decision on the Labour leadership (see previous post), I asked supporters of each Miliband brother on Twitter to recommend to me one video and one article/blog post which would show their preferred candidate at his best.

Here is a selection of the best responses for each candidate. These helped me reach my decision: they are posted in the hope that they may help others do the same.

Ed Miliband

Speech at the LSE on the Living Wage:

“I don’t think we should try to out-right the right on crime.”

Change to Win. (Ed’s Fabian Society essay.)

David Miliband

VIDEO: Sun Cabbie interview.

Keir Hardie lecture.

Labour must build a broad coalition.

The continuity myth: why David Miliband is not a Blairite continuity candidate.

And it has to be said: this video of Ed Miliband in the Commons, while billed by one of his supporters as evidence of his ability to take on the government in debate, only reinforced my concerns about Ed being made to look shrill and hysterical once he was facing David Cameron rather than a lightweight like Chris Huhne.

Thanks again to all those who responded to my request. It was a big help in reaching my decision, even if some of you may be dismayed by what that decision was… 😉

Which Miliband? Yes, it’s…

Well, I think I’ve finally reached a decision on the Labour leadership. It’s always been a matter of “which Miliband?”, but I’ve been surprised at how difficult I’ve found it to choose between them. 

On the face of it, it ought to be easy: Ed Miliband is the more obviously left-wing of the two, and I’m impressed by his emphasis on policies such as the Living Wage. David Miliband, by contrast, is widely seen as the “Blairite” candidate, the candidate of the Labour right, and in particular as being tainted by his support for the Iraq invasion in 2003. 

So on paper, Ed is the better choice for me. But we’re not electing a set of policy proposals: we’re electing a leader. And in the end – having seen them both in action at the CSM hustings, and having read numerous articles and speeches (and watched a number of videos) by and about each brother – David strikes me as having greater credibility than Ed as a party leader – and as a prospective prime minister. 

I say this with a degree of reluctance, and not entirely without misgivings. I don’t believe David Miliband is the “Blair Mark II” or “continuity candidate”, but there is something dispiriting about hearing New Labour nostrums about “responsibilities as well as rights” and so on given a fresh airing by him. (Contrast Andy Burnham’s formulation in his “Sun Cabbie” interview: “everyone looks out for each other but everyone does their bit”, which says the same thing in a fresher and more concrete way.) 

I was impressed by his Keir Hardie lecture, however, and by his support for increased use of mutualisation. I also agree with him on the need for Labour to build a broad coalition again, as in 1997 – which means not completely burning our boats with Lib Dem supporters (and not patronising them, Ed). And while I find the term “community organisers” a little toe-curling – a little too obvious in its attempt to evoke Obama – David Miliband’s drive to train up 1,000 community organisers does at least show a concrete commitment to developing Labour’s grassroots campaigning – an area where New Labour was weak, and which is now essential both on the basis of principle (the sort of party we want to be) and pragmatism (the party is too financially embarrassed to engage in high-cost national campaigns). 

More negatively, my feeling is that Ed Miliband is a little too “lightweight” to be a credible leader going toe-to-toe with David Cameron. Having seen him misjudge his audience at the CSM hustings by speaking in too impassioned a manner (and, more to the point, ignoring the actual question that had been put to him), my big fear is that Cameron would find it all-too easy to portray Ed as shrill and a bit gauche: “Calm down, dear!” The most effective weapon against Cameron is not spittle-flecked oratory but a forensic dismantling of his claims: a task to which David strikes me as better suited. 

And in the end, there’s only one question that matters for me: which candidate has the best prospect of delivering a Labour government at the next election? One thing the coalition is demonstrating in its first few months in office is that even an imperfect Labour government is better than a Tory (or Tory-dominated) one. I’d rather have a Labour government led by David, but quite likely implementing many of Ed’s policies (such as his Living Wage proposals), than a Labour party whose leadership’s pronouncements are more congenial to my ears but which remains in opposition. 

Note: This was written before I heard about Jon Cruddas’ formal endorsement of David Miliband yesterday. I agree with pretty much every word of what Cruddas says in his interview with New Statesman – including his criticisms of David Miliband. Like Cruddas, I am not completely sold on everything MiliD stands for or says, but still think he is the best candidate for rebuilding Labour as a more pluralist, communitarian and activist political organisation. 

A part of me still regrets that Cruddas did not stand for the leadership himself, if only to enhance the level of debate. However, my support for the “Cruddas for Labour Chair” campaign starts here…

But on the other hand…

…there’s a lot to be said for Ed Miliband as leader, too. Still haven’t made my mind up, but definitely giving Ed a second look, especially after reading things like this.

After all, I am a wandering hedgehog…

What David Miliband did (and didn’t) say

David Miliband’s Keir Hardie Lecture this week may prove to be a key document in understanding MiliD’s political philosophy and leadership priorities. It’s worth reading: I wouldn’t say it blew me away, but it was good, solid stuff.

A couple of aspects of the lecture have caused controversy (especially, it has to be said, among opponents of Miliband who have only read news reports of the lecture rather than the lecture itself): first, Miliband’s alleged “back-stabbing” attack on Gordon Brown; second, his supposed endorsement of the Tories’ “Big Society” concept.

First, the “attack” on Brown. Miliband’s comments are worth quoting at length:

I agreed completely with Gordon Brown, when he became Prime Minister in 2007, that we needed renewal.  I supported and voted for him.  I agreed that we needed greater moral seriousness and less indifference to the excesses of a celebrity drenched culture.  I agreed with him when he said that we needed greater coherence as a government, particularly in relation to child poverty and equality.  I agreed with him on the importance of party reform and a meaningful internationalism that would be part of a unified government strategy.  I agreed that we needed a civic morality to champion civility when confronting a widespread indifference to others.

But, it didn’t happen.

It was not just more of the same.  Far from correcting them failings – tactics, spin, high-handedness – intensified; and we lost many of our strengths – optimism born of clear strategy, bold plans for change and reform, a compelling articulation of aspiration and hope.  We did not succeed in renewing ourselves in office; and the roots of that failure were deep not recent, about procedure and openness, or lack of it, as much as policy.  That is a political fact and now words are cheap but the stakes are high.

In general terms, some criticism of the last years of the Labour government has to be in order. If we can’t say that Labour got things wrong while in office, then the implication is that it was the electorate who got it wrong in throwing us out. I suspect that, in their heart of  hearts, many Labour people feel that way to some extent. The key to renewal is how quickly we can shake off such self-pity and engage honestly with our mistake.

As for the specifics of Miliband’s criticisms, to be blunt I have to agree with him on them. He accurately summarises what we were hoping for when Gordon Brown became prime minister – seriousness, coherence, reform, a new “civic morality” – and equally accurately summarises how those hopes were disappointed, notwithstanding the positive achievements of Brown’s premiership (especially in response to the banking crisis).

Some have said that Miliband should have said this while in office, should have taken Brown on and challenged him in order to foster debate and renewal. I think that would be been catastrophic: a party openly at war with itself while in government would have done far worse than we managed in May. On the contrary, the main hesitation I’ve had about supporting Miliband has been the perception that he did too much to stir up rumours about leadership challenges.

As for the second point, about David Miliband’s supposed endorsement for the “Big Society”, this can be refuted just by quoting what he actually said:

I take the Big Society seriously.  But it is a piece of doublethink – a small society maintained by voluntarism and charity alone. I want a bigger society, based on reciprocity not just kindness or charity, and I intend to make that a Labour issue.

In other words, the Tories’ “Big Society” is a crock, mere rhetoric to mask a cuts agenda. But Labour had become too associated with statism, and if the Big Society has any political resonance at all then it’s out of people’s concerns over an approach to the state that “turns citizens into consumers and makes government a giant problem solver, which only increases our technical managerialism”.

David Miliband’s proposed alternative is to emphasise “community ethics” with “a creed that could combine solidarity with responsibility, freedom and equality”. Quite what that means in terms of practical policy remains to be seen, but it’s an approach for which I have an instinctive sympathy (not least as a member of the Co-operative Party).

That said: you’ll notice that what has animated me from Miliband’s lecture is responding against misunderstandings or misrepresentations of its content, rather than the positive content itself. Perhaps that just means I didn’t read it carefully enough, but I think it also shows that David Miliband still has some way to go in articulating both a political philosophy and concrete policies that can really inspire and capture the imagination.

And I wish he’d stop going on about that sodding swimming pool. 😉

Ed Miliband: leader, or “éminence rouge”?

Thinking further about what I was saying in my previous post, this in many ways comes down to the role of what used to be called “the soft left”. Ed Miliband has pitched himself as a standard-bearer for this tradition within Labour – the tradition with which I’m most comfortable identifying – and that may yet carry him to the leadership.

But is Labour leader the best place for someone like Ed Miliband to advance a “soft left” agenda? In many ways, the Labour leadership exists to disappoint and frustrate the hopes of the left, and Ed Miliband as leader would undoubtedly end up disappointing and frustrating many who now support him.

The Tories tried electing leaders who represented the political instincts of their base: William Hague and (even more so) Iain Duncan Smith. The result was a disaster, both for the Conservative party and the individuals themselves. They then elected someone (Cameron) who was, in many ways, a disappointment to their core supporters, with his sympathy for gay rights and support (however opportunistic) for “green” issues. However, behind the scenes of Cameron’s leadership, his more ideologically-minded colleagues have been able to regroup and develop policies that advance their agenda far more effectively than they were able to achieve by securing the party leadership.

The example of Iain Duncan Smith is once again instructive: disastrously ineffective as party leader, but now responsible for a significant area of policy on which he has developed his expertise and for which he has a clear passion (for good or ill).

Ed Miliband is no Iain Duncan Smith, of course, and would be far better as Labour leader than Duncan Smith was as head of the Tory party. But he may still do better service to Labour through his policy expertise, advancing a “soft left” agenda more effectively as an “éminence rouge” than would be possible as party leader.