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Every leadership is founded, to a greater or lesser extent, in myth. Of all the collective delusions that have sprung up in Labour ranks since Ed Miliband's victory on Saturday the most egregious and the most prevalent is the claim that he somehow represents a fresh start, that he is untarnished by the feuding and nastiness of the Blair-Brown years.
It is as though, like Athena springing fully formed from Zeus's head, the party's new leader wasn't around when Tony, Gordon and Peter were tearing chunks out of each other.
The truth is otherwise. Miliband's knifing of his elder brother is quintessentially New Labour in its sheer brutality and treachery: having urged David not to run against Gordon Brown, Ed stepped over him to claim the crown with a ruthlessness that makes Blair's supposed betrayal of Brown in 1994 seem like small potatoes. No spin operation during the contest was more devious or more successful than the one run by Ed's campaign.
Charlie Whelan's reported claim that he persuaded half a dozen MPs to switch second preference to the younger Miliband — enough to swing it for him — tells you a lot about how the battle was really fought.
Let us be clear: whatever the new leader insists to the contrary, this is a victory for the Brownites, achieved by Brownite means. Miliband's declaration that Labour's long civil war is now over, ended by a “new generation”, is either deeply dishonest or hopelessly naïve: a leader who wins in this manner, without the majority support of his MPs or his constituency activists, has scant cause to expect unity.
Of course, as one Labour strategist argued to me, “the fact that David won among the MPs and party members shows that Blair did change the party”. The trouble is that he didn't change it enough. Fourteen years ago, the Blairite ultra Stephen Byers caused a stir by suggesting to a group of journalists at a seafood restaurant in Blackpool during the TUC conference that Labour might break the union link entirely. Yet Blair never found a different means of funding the party: indeed, from the Ecclestone affair to the loans-for-honours scandal, the quest for fresh financial streams that might liberate Labour from its historic dependency upon the unions always landed him in grave trouble.
On The Andrew Marr Show yesterday, Miliband insisted that he was his “own man”, that he was no union stooge. Yet he squirmed and dithered when asked about specific proposals for industrial action. “I'm not sure often that megaphone diplomacy from politicians helps very much,” he declared.
Yet true leadership resides in taking a stand, in saying things that your tribe won't like but are in the public interest. Miliband's cop-out formula — that strikes should be a “last resort” — reminded me of Neil Kinnock's hapless equivocations. If Miliband does after all go on the march on Parliament with the unions on October 19, the day before George Osborne's spending review, we shall know where his sympathy truly lies.
Indeed, there is every sign that — under the cover of freshness and modernity — Miliband plans to take his party back to the status quo ante Blair. Conscious of the need to address the adhesive “Red Ed” label, he talks about defending the “squeezed middle” — exactly the phrase Gordon Brown deployed whenever he feared that he was not getting through to Middle Britain. Yet there is absolutely no sign that Miliband truly understands the importance of aspiration in contemporary society: he will doubtless go through the motions in his speech to the Labour conference tomorrow, finding some way of tipping his hat to Mondeo Man. But that is not where his heart lies.
He is an old-fashioned egalitarian, on the side of the union member and the producer interest. He promises to address the deficit — but only as one issue among many, rather than the defining crisis of our time. During the contest, he made unfunded spending pledges that would add many billions to the taxpayer's burden. The Tories claim that there is a £67 billion hole in Miliband's sums: what answer does he have to that, and to the anxiety of the “squeezed middle” that Labour is not serious about getting the country's finances back on track, that it is squeamish about the measures necessary to sort out the mess which it left?
The taut canvas of Blair's Big Tent encompassed huge swathes of the nation. Miliband's Labour will feel better about itself — more at ease, less unsettled by its leader. But it will be a diminished force, a sect or pressure group trying to displace a two-party alliance that, under David Cameron and Nick Clegg, has successfully straddled the centre ground as Blair did in his day.
Tomorrow, and for the rest of his leadership, Miliband will make appropriate noises to show that he understands the concerns of the white-collar voters in the South and the Midlands whom Labour lost in May. In his memoirs, Blair makes a shrewd distinction between the Kinnock position — “the party needs power, we're just going to have to compromise with the electorate” — and his own — “the voters are right and we should change not because we have to but because we want to”.
Miliband is like Kinnock. If he woos Middle Britain, it will be from a sense of electoral necessity, rather than conviction. And the voters will spot this a mile off.
In this sense, Miliband is Kinnock's Kid as much as Cameron is Heir to Blair. Tomorrow, he will posture as the voice of the new, the standard-bearer of change. In fact, the change he stands for is change back: he is a heritage politician, a young man selling nostalgia as if it were the future. Novelty wears off very quickly when it isn't novelty at all.
Reader views (4)
No balance at all. This might as well have been a Conservative Party political broadcast. Tory stooge.
- alan campbell, london,uk, 28/09/2010 00:36
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Same old red-bating bull Matthew? Haven't you got something better to do than write the same article over and over again? Please leave those with a sense of social justice to argue the case rather than disparage them in your by-now well-tired and over-wrought prose.
We can see right through you, Matthew, you are a low-level apparatchik on Planet Cameron, please stay there...and stay off the pies.
- stephen, london, 27/09/2010 20:01
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Good to see the loser Kinnock embracing Red Ed.
- John, Manchester, 27/09/2010 19:30
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What is the point of having this man comment on politics?.He is a member of Cameron,"set".So how is he ever going to be anything other than partisan.
- colin, barking essex, 27/09/2010 15:55
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