Ed Makes His Move?
The Spectator picks this from the Climate Change Secretary’s Observer article:
Let’s start, as our manifesto will, with what the country needs in the coming five years. It can’t be about business as usual. We need to rebuild our economy in a different way from the past, with more jobs in real engineering not just financial engineering. This economy of the future can only be created if we understand the role of government, complementing the private sector, in making it happen, nurturing industries from digital to low carbon. The last thing Britain needs is a government that thinks its only role is to get out of the way.
This is true of so many of the issues our country faces: climate change, reforming social care, getting more young people a good education, dealing with crime and antisocial behaviour. All require a party that believes in the power of collective action.
What’s the point of the article, they ask? I think the answer’s obvious. Ed’s prepared to weather the oncoming storm, and set out a no-nonsense stall for the leadership post-general election clamity. He’s articulated a new political thinking – it’s threadbare, sure, but there’s a cohesion to what he’s suggesting which is not what is coming either from Brown or the cabinet. My money is still on Ed Miliband to lead the Labour Party in opposition, which if he plays his cards right could be quite brief. There’s no love for Cameron out there, and I’m going to guess his majority will be slim. On contentious issues like the repeal of the Human Rights Act he may well find himself at the painful end of a vote of no confidence. That’s the time at which David Miliband would fail to strike – leaving the question: what about Ed?
My question remains – if he has any intention of providing governmental solutions by ‘collective action’, will it be by authoritarian diktat or will he enable the individual freedom needed in order to achieve them? New Labour decided it would force people to behave as it wanted in every conceivable sphere – what follows will have to decide to undo that mentality. If a Miliband shadow administration were prepared not to kowtow to every corporate interest coming its way, it may the first one in some time with something positive to offer. Time will tell.
If It’s Either of Them It Should Be Ed
It’s been clear to me for some time that David Miliband, eager to be liked by all of the people all of the time, hasn’t had the drive needed to become Prime Minister. And as New Labour declines towards its inevitable, ideology-free end in May, it’s also been clear that new thinking and new presentation – a whole new attitude is needed to guide a rump Labour Party to its next incarnation. It should be Ed Miliband, and others are starting to agree:
Miliband Jr has four strengths, goes the thinking. He is a more natural media performer than his brother, as his assured appearances at Copenhagen showed; he connects more easily with the party, which he has been courting assiduously as co-ordinator of Labour’s general election manifesto; and he would find it easier to unite the party, whose left and right wings are warming to him. As a 40-year-old, who has only been an MP for five years, he represents more of a break with the Blair/Brown era.
There is another factor that is being whispered: he may have worked for Brown, but Miliband Jr has not been afraid to stand up to his master. A year ago he irritated the prime minister by wringing out environmental concessions before signing up to the third runway at Heathrow.
“Heathrow was Ed’s coming of age,” one member of the cabinet says. “Ed, who made life quite difficult for Gordon, had a big influence on the decision. But he is collegiate and he has stuck by it.”
He’s by no means perfect. His lofty words about the green economy are rarely matched by deeds (Vestas anyone?), but in my mind he’s the only choice to lead the party away from the utterly discredited Blair/Brown era. Time will tell if it happens, and more importantly if he chooses bring an actual ideological bent to it, the complete absence of which after all is what caused voters to be alienated from it in the first place.
