The first useful thing Labour’s post-Miliband leadership could do is to stop talking about the Tories being “the party of the rich”. Not since Gordon Brown last boasted of bringing about “an end to boom and bust” has a foolish, leftwing slogan made me flinch so easily.
Both phrases matter because they indicate a deeper misunderstanding than mere sloganeering. Acting leader, Harriet Harman, was right this week, to warn against instant explanations for what went wrong for Labour’s election campaign, though she sometimes does it in a strident manner than belies her contrite message.
But even before the re-anointed Cameron donned his new blue collar – a significant shift which Patrick Wintour elegantly examines here – Ed Miliband’s campaign mantra wasn’t true. Of course, super-rich types tend to vote Tory, though some of the 1% also vote against their economic interests and back Labour for other reasons.
Ditto Conservative voters. The Tory appeal is wider than the yachties. It speaks to the individualistic and ambitious, to the socially conservative and the patriotic, to many of the five million small-businesspeople in this country. It appeals to immigrants who like the idea of social hierarchy, of God and the Queen, or want the door closed to other immigrants who may crowd the GP’s waiting room.
So “party of the rich” was one measure of Miliband’s too-narrow vision and appeal. His attacks on exploitative monopolies, on the painful inequality between people and regions in contemporary Britain, struck chords (some folk have two kitchens, would you believe), but not in a sufficiently convincing way.
As a pal of mine said in the pub last night (he’s not a pollster, so read on): “Plenty of people wanted to vote Labour last Thursday, they don’t like the Tories. But when it came to it in the polling both they just couldn’t do it. They just couldn’t believe in Ed as prime minister.” That was my hunch too, has been since 2010 actually.
But let’s not kick more Ibiza sand in Miliband’s face. He is a serious and decent man who did his best on a faulty analysis. Quite why he wanted to become Labour leader after his old boss’s defeat remains a more intriguing puzzle to me, especially since it meant pushing aside his better-qualified big brother. He didn’t have to do it and face the likely prospect of defeat. Why not let David take the beating?
Yes, I know ambitious politicians sometimes feel the call is NOW and that hesitation will cost them their best chance to do something for their country. The lucky ones know they have the answers. As Robert Harris pointed out in the Sunday Times, it wasn’t that Ed lacked confidence or decisiveness. Quite the reverse. Voters might have welcomed more honest doubt.
So Ed Miliband’s parallel rejection of the triple-election winning formula devised by Tony Blair was all part of the wider conviction and strategy as well as tactics. It’s what Al Gore did to Bill Clinton in 2000 and we know what happened to him, the ninny.
Blair offered his own post-result thoughts in Sunday’s Observer, a measured, generous verdict I thought (it even contained some contrition), but then he’s had five years in which to polish the piece he must have known he’d be writing.
Yes, I realise Blair is anathema to a vocal minority on the left and (more sensibly) on the Tory right, he is Labour’s divisive Thatcher, casting a long shadow. But most voters don’t see him that way. When he talks about owning the future in a fast-changing world, about embracing technology and optimism (as well as better organisation) he’s making points which smart Iraqis would acknowledge too, despite everything his mistakes helped inflict on them.
Owen Jones also has a “bread and roses” crack at aspiration and the future in Wednesday’s Guardian; some good points too, but flawed by its Milibandian narrowness of tone. Owen and Tony should get together and hammer out a joint article. But remember, if you want to move the centre-ground to the left you have to dig the soil and plant something attractive there first. In 2015 honest doubt is OK too (except in Scotland, of course, which is in the grip of religious fervour).
Where does that leave the masochists now lining up for the privilege of becoming Labour’s next leader in the lions’ den? Not in a good place, I’d say, but politics is an optimistic trade – it has to be – and they’re all volunteers.
Where those who wanted a quickie election over by July – at least until today’s timetable was agreed by Labour’s national executive – are wrong is in their desire for unity over a frank exchange of honest disagreement about past mistakes and future choices.
Harman was wrong too in telling critics from the previous government – the one that kept winning elections – that they should shut up. She spoke shortly after mild-mannered and courteous Alistair Darling joined the chorus on Monday. David Miliband has since joined in while ruling himself out.
They have all been pretty disciplined during Miliband’s tenure, whatever private doubts they harboured. When the likes of Darling and Alan Johnson speak out they’re not doing it as an ego trip, as some do.
After Blair left office in 2007, Brown distanced himself from his predecessor’s failures and controversies – in rhetoric, though not in much substance, as it turned out. Miliband distanced himself from both with some disastrous consequences.
As Alan Johnson noted they included his failure on BBC Question Time to defend Blair/Brown from the charge that their policies, not reckless casino banking, caused the recession. Watching the programme, I tweeted the following:
#bbcquestiontime Ed Mil had just made a complete balls up answering the " you bust the country, not the bankers" question. It was bankers
— MichaelWhite (@MichaelWhite) April 30, 2015
So it is not just hindsight here. Nor was it hindsight to flinch at Gordon Brown’s foolish “no more boom and bust” talk. There are always economic cycles: periods of growth followed by those of readjustment. Politicians can take action to level out the peaks and troughs.
Brown is open to criticism for failing to do that before the 2007 crash, but the correct answer is not just to admit one’s own mistakes on over-borrowing and under-regulating the “banksters”, as Etonian Tory former PM Harold Macmillan used to call them. It is to point out that David Cameron and George Osborne endorsed Labour tax and spend strategies (plus light-touch regulation) until well after the house caught fire.
All this and much more needs to be thrashed out by wannabe Labour leaders since there was little enough intellectual honesty from any of the parties during the election campaign, let alone after Brown’s leadership coronation in 2007.
Labour needs to talk about the real imperatives, as well as easy-sounding choices, that lie behind austerity, about creating a public service which is fair but also more efficient, about not pretending that every hospital and every A&E department must stay open. Few candidates have the guts to say that, but someone must: they close anyway.
Who should win? I haven’t made up my mind. Let’s see whose names actually go forward and what they have to say. I was asked by the BBC to discuss runners and riders last night. I declined for reasons granny would have approved: if you can’t say anything nice about people, best not to say anything at all.
I hope to revise that curmudgeonly opinion upwards. Meanwhile let’s hear it for contrition and honest doubt. Voters might warm to it. They don’t much seem to like certainty.
