T he day after Ed Miliband was chosen as Labour leader in September 2010, I declared in this space that David Cameron had just “won the next general election”. Much more recently, I wrote that Miliband might turn out to be a political fratricide and nothing more. So it is only after careful thought that I now say: Ed Miliband has had a very good week.
The proximate cause of this was not a speech or interview given by the Labour leader but a querulous article in Tuesday’s Guardian by Len Mccluskey, the general secretary of Unite. Responding to an interview in the same newspaper with Ed Balls, Mccluskey complained that the shadow chancellor’s “sudden weekend embrace of austerity and the Government’s public-sector pay squeeze represents a victory for discredited Blairism at the expense of the party’s core supporters. It also challenges the whole course Ed Miliband has set for the party, and perhaps his leadership itself.”
This was so unbelievably helpful an intervention that I facetiously suggested to one of the Labour leader’s lieutenants that he send Mccluskey a thank-you present. For 16 months, Miliband has been dogged by his reputation as the cat’s paw of organised labour, the marionette twitching on the strings pulled by the union paymasters whose patronage ensured his victory in the leadership race by a mere 0.65 per cent (his brother being the choice of both parliamentarians and party members). But here, at last, was the boss of Britain’s largest union denouncing Ed, his fiscal strategy and his captaincy of the movement. For a Labour leader looking for a boost in credibility, it doesn’t come much better.
This was the unexpected dividend of a long conversation between Miliband and Balls that was prompted by George Osborne’s Autumn Statement and the Chancellor’s recognition that austerity measures would have to continue into the next Parliament. The Coalition, in all its frugal gloom, looked realistic and worthy of office. The Eds, apparently claiming that the answer to borrowing too much was to borrow even more, had rarely seemed more distant from reality and from the grown-ups’ table.
Before Christmas, the Labour leader and shadow chancellor decided that their present position was politically untenable. To gain a hearing, they would have to acknowledge at least some of the
fiscal realities: if they regained power in 2015, as Balls told the Guardian last weekend, they would “have to keep all these cuts… At this stage, we can make no commitments to reverse any of that, on spending or on tax.” On the same day, the shadow chancellor used a speech to the Fabian Society to acknowledge the heart of the matter: “Credibility is based on trust and trust is based on honesty.”
For months, senior Labour figures have been wrestling with precisely this Confucian-sounding axiom. They recognise that the public does not trust them as prospective custodians of the economy; yet they are unwilling to accept that the deficit inherited by the Coalition in 2010 was, in significant part, the consequence of excessive Labour spending.
How, then, to regain the economic credibility which the party so spectacularly lost under Gordon Brown? The strategy proposed by Miliband and Balls is best characterised as a selective capitulation to reality. They will not say sorry for past profligacy; they will continue to oppose Coalition cuts. But they now accept without caveat that, in the Labour leader’s words, “whoever governs after 2015 will have to find more savings”. Or as one of Miliband’s closest allies puts it: “There’s nothing Left-wing about being in denial.”
Let’s not get too excited: this position is conspicuously open to ridicule. How can one plausibly oppose cuts as an Opposition – which Labour will still do – but accept those same cuts pre-emptively as the incoming government of 2015? The position is not absolutely illogical: one can try to thwart something, while preparing to deal with its eventual outcome further down the line. But – as the classic Viz character Mr Logic so marvellously shows – it is possible to be both logical and absurd. The risk is that the voters will simply snigger at the silliness of a party that says austerity is bad now, when the wicked Tories are in power – but would be “hard-headed and realistic” in its Labour variant. For the secular priesthood of neo-keynesianism, Labour’s new economic “narrative” is perfectly sound. I’d just like to hear them sell it on the doorstep – to a nation of Ollies who still see Labour as the Stan that got us into the “fine mess” in the first place.
There are other risks. Miliband’s speech launching the strategy at the Oxo Tower on January 10 was a lacklustre affair, rhetorically unequal to its political task. A Today interview with John Humphrys on the same day became a duel over Miliband’s fitness to lead his party, and the fiscal message was all but lost – another reason why Ed owes Len Mccluskey a bottle of Scotch. Even when the interviews stick to economic matters, there is a terrible danger of mixed messages and confused signals – as Ms Harman showed in her Today programme appearance last Tuesday.
None the less, I stick to my judgment that Ed has had a very good week. Why? Because it seems just possible now that the wheels of his long-circling plane have at last hit the runway of reality. Progressives so often see this as sell-out, as collusion in the enemy’s framing of the argument, or (in the time-honoured phrase) “compromising with the electorate”. But recent history shows that the Left prospers when it acknowledges the odds stacked against it, and the toughness of the measures it may have to take. As Tony Blair’s rewriting of Clause Four demonstrated, apologies are not the only way to signal change: statements of intent can do the trick as well as retrospective declarations of contrition. One of the most important steps for Labour’s return to power in 1997 was its announcement in January of that year that it would stick to the Tories’ proposed spending totals for the first two years.
In an interview last year, I asked Balls (who, as Brown’s close adviser, was intimately involved in that decision 15 years ago) whether we could expect similar dramatisations of intent from the two Eds. “If we don’t have those moments, we won’t win the election,” he replied, “because people won’t have heard what we said, and seen the character of us as politicians.” And this is why, I am told, you will see Labour seeking to outflank the Coalition with proposed savings in certain areas to fund its own priorities.
Until the party regains its economic credibility, everything it has to say about “responsible capitalism” (a big theme for Miliband this week at Davos), or anything else for that matter, will have no traction whatsoever. For the first time, the Labour leader looks as if he has at last got his head round that most basic political rule: what marketers call the winning of “permission”. He doesn’t look like a winner yet, and perhaps he never will. What he has said, of course, is nothing like sufficient; but it sure was necessary.