PAINED LABOUR

The Labour Party is indulging its death wish again. You’d think its supporters in Westminster and Fleet Street would remember how damaging these bouts can be. But we know that journalists and columnists have the attention span of a mayfly and backbenchers would die of boredom if they didn’t have something vague but loomingly large to gossip and grumble about.

Ever since the Tory press started to worry last autumn that Ed Miliband might prove to be an effective and election-winning leader, it has systematically attacked him in its columns and editorials – and of course in its news-reporting which, in modern newspapers, is not distinct from expressions of opinion. If Miliband were not doing well, they wouldn’t need to bother. But the endlessly suggestible backbenchers and the commentators in the centrist and slightly left-ish papers have let themselves be influenced by these attacks and are parroting them. So now a consensus is building that Miliband is not doing well.

The front page of The Sunday Times today cites David Blunkett and John Prescott to justify its headline: “Labour big beasts maul Ed Miliband”. Here is the entirety of the “mauling” quoted from Blunkett: “We need to remember that Ed has only been opposition leader for eight months and it took David Cameron two years to establish himself in the public eye. However, the next year will prove vital in creating momentum and a sense of direction”. Stand well back while the blood flows past you.

Ed Miliband has every reason to be fed up

There are also quotes from party donors (all of them usually figures of fun) and further unattributed quotes, none of them especially critical of Miliband. The most savage unnamed speaker has a go at Ed Balls. This kind of non-story suggests that the Murdoch press do not expect readers actually to read their journalism but merely to be swayed by headlines that bear little relation to the text. And insofar as people do skip over political news and glimpse front pages in shops or being read by others, such headlines probably do have the effect required by Murdoch’s own political agenda.

John Prescott is also quoted in the Sunday Times piece. Prescott spent the morning on Twitter angrily denying that he and the author of the piece, Isabel Oakeshott (whom Prescott rather niftily refers to as Bullshott), had discussed anything other than how she came by his ex-directory number. He says that the quote was pure invention and the paper eventually accepted that and posted an apology. But of course in the unlikely event that a retraction appears on page 94 of next Sunday’s edition, it won’t signify because the lie has been spread. Job done.

How galling this all must be for Miliband. He must ask himself, as I ask, what the hell these grumblers think they want. The 2015 manifesto to be published now? Another leadership contest? The leader to change his voice, as Margaret Thatcher did, or his choice of headgear, as William Hague did, or – worst of all – his instinct not to grin inanely, as Gordon Brown did? Once it becomes the conventional wisdom that Labour cannot win with this leader, nothing he does will satisfy the doubters. If he starts to trim to accommodate this insanity, he will begin to make gestures that are against his own instincts and then he really will be in trouble. As Michael White wrote in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago, “some Labour activists are gagging to be betrayed”.

John Prescott contemplates The Sunday Times; or channels Les Dawson

Today’s Observer carries various soundbites of “advice” from presumed supporters of the party. Needless to say, they don’t stand up to much scrutiny. Sunder Katwala of the Fabian Society has the most supportive verdict on Miliband’s leadership thus far, but his advice on how to proceed is far from useful: “Articulate his strategy to get Labour into power … we need to hear where the leader defines where he wants the rethink to end up”. That sounds like fair advice for the party conference in, at the earliest, 2013.

Robert Philpot of Progress says that “Labour needs to reach out to those who have voted Tory in the past”. A lot of modern politicians talk about “reaching out” without suggesting what it means in practice. Philpot’s notion seems to involve co-opting right wing policies. If the opposite of reaching out is shoving away, then such a switch would certainly shove away many who have voted Labour in the past.

A lot of the others use the kind of warm waffle that all politicians of all persuasions use – about articulating people’s aspirations, reconnecting to the people, uniting interests under common themes. Ed Miliband already goes in for too much warm waffle. I hope he doesn’t take any of this vague and patronising advice to heart.

Prescott in his 20s: rather a looker

Guardian columnists like Martin Kettle and John Harris, nominally Labour supporters, do Cameron’s work for him by wringing their hands over the future of Labour, just as they did while Gordon Brown was prime minister. You begin to wonder if they aren’t Tory fifth columnists. They and the Labour backbenchers briefing against Miliband need to ask themselves some serious and searching questions:

1) How much of your criticism of/misgivings about Miliband translates directly into a wish that somebody else was leading the party, rather than that he would change his personality (which he won’t and shouldn’t be expected to do)?

2) If someone else is to lead the party, who? Can you guarantee that similar criticism and misgivings will not arise twelve months into that leader’s reign, rendering the leadership change pointlessly damaging?

3) What policies is Miliband failing to advance that would carry any support in the party?

4) How does any leader of the opposition, of any party, connect with the public without gimmicks or stunts? Are you absolutely sure that you don’t secretly want some kind of celebrity as party leader? If so, there is one who would happily take the job and I’d like to hear why you would not support him. His name is Ken Livingstone.

Labour is running a consistent opinion poll lead of five or six percent over the Tories. Sceptics say that this is “soft” and that it should be higher. Sceptics, by their nature, are never satisfied with anything. It is often said that the ballot box is the only poll that counts, so let’s examine the by-elections in this parliament. Bear in mind that all three could be accounted “unnecessary”, that is to say, precipitated by a vacancy that ought to have been avoided. In the past, the vote has often reflected irritation with unwarranted electoral burdens of this kind. Not this year.

Labour held Oldham East & Saddleworth on January 13th with 42.1 percent of the vote, an increase of 10.2 percent on the general election. The Tories came third, shedding 13.6 percent of their vote. Labour held Barnsley Central on March 3rd with 60.8 percent of the vote, an increase of 13.5 percent on the general election. The Tories came third (after UKIP), dropping 9 percent of their vote. (The Lib Dems fell from second to sixth). Labour held Leicester South on May 5th with 57.8 percent of the vote, an increase of 12.2 percent on the general election. The Tories came third, shedding 6.3 percent of their vote. The next by-election will be at Inverclyde, this time an unavoidable one because the sitting member died. It will be held on June 30th. I am hopeful that the 14,500 Labour majority is safe, even from the SNP.

You can call Labour’s support as soft as you like, but these are real results in real elections. I can’t see anything in these results suggesting that Ed Miliband has anything to fear from the electorate just yet. An average increase in a party’s vote of 11.97 percent is pretty impressive by anyone’s standards, especially in relatively safe seats where the scope for advance is necessarily limited. I look forward to the first by-election in a Tory seat and, even more, in a Lib Dem seat.

Oh Balls, here comes another revelation.

None of this is to say that I am complacent about Labour’s chances or uncritical of Miliband’s positions. I will advance some criticisms below, but they will be of policy not of personality, of substance not of style. The context of them is, however, that I know of no one in the parliamentary party who is advocating, privately or publicly, the policies that I advocate.

First, I think it a great pity that Labour supported the government’s policy on Libya. I have set out my own view on the matter in earlier postings and do not propose to rehearse it here. But, with his well-known opposition to the Iraq invasion, Miliband could credibly and consistently have voiced opposition to Britain joining the NATO attacks on Gaddafi’s regime. Such opposition would have anticipated the dwindling support for the action among the British public and given Labour a line to use about public finances, so that, when Cameron and Osborne claim “no alternative”, Miliband and Balls could say “don’t spend £3million per day on military hubris”.

Second, Labour ought to have immediately countered the coalition’s attacks on the welfare state and public expenditure by demanding a balancing attack on tax loopholes, bank profits and city bonuses. There is a deep well of untapped public resentment against tax avoiders, non doms, fat cats and those who are patently not “all in this together” with the rest of us. Miliband and Balls can openly accept that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling got too close to the city and that city regulation was neglected by successive Labour governments. They need to counter Cameron’s playground taunts that “you didn’t do it when you could” with an undertaking to do it next time and a strong statement that Labour not having done it does not justify the coalition not doing it.

Third, Labour does need to get onto the front foot about the government’s record. Cameron easily turns arguments about his present policies into attacks on Labour’s past policies and/or lack of present policies. Miliband – indeed, the whole Labour frontbench – needs to grab this nettle and make it clear that the only policies of interest to anyone are those being presently pursued. Cameron’s stock answer – what would Labour do? – needs to be neutralised as irrelevant when there is no election in sight. It doesn’t matter what Labour would/might do and has/hasn’t done. The only thing that actually redounds on people’s lives right now is what the coalition is doing right now. Labour must keep the focus on that and that alone.

The current email revelations have not been fielded cleverly. Ed Balls shouldn’t leave himself looking slippery, defensive and rattled by trying to deny plotting or justify what may or may not have been said. Rather, he should take the line that The Daily Telegraph ought to be prosecuted for receiving stolen goods, that the paper – with its regular use of illicitly acquired material, whether by sending a fake constituent wired into Vince Cable’s surgery or publishing stolen records of MPs’ expenses – is no better than the News of the World hacking public figures’ mobile phones. And nor is The Guardian publishing the diplomatic traffic hacked by WikiLeaks. He should say that nobody outside the loop can know about party and government relations because the emails are only a part of the story seen out of context. And anyway it’s nobody else’s fucking business (he probably should leave out “fucking”).

Regular readers will know that I felt that Gordon Brown should have attacked SkyNews for broadcasting his private remarks about Gillian Duffy rather than humiliating himself for being overheard. It’s the same with the emails. Politicians need to tough out these attacks and to counter with the absolutely justified argument that the gutter methods of the media need to be brought under control by legislation. I don’t advocate more secrecy. I do advocate more confidentiality.

Labour has a big and juicy target to oppose as the coalition unravels and Cameron’s overweening self-confidence leads him into more and more miscalculation. Support for the coalition is on a downward path. In the end, elections are always lost by governments rather than won by oppositions. Ed Miliband has every reason to expect to be the next prime minister. But he needs not only to ride out the misgivings but to quell them.

I’d start by retiring at least two-thirds of his under-performing shadow cabinet and toughing out any outcry from the party about the supposed democracy of having a voted-in front bench. The party has made life difficult for itself by electing too much dead wood. Miliband could do much worse than bring some hungry and angry trouble-makers into the front line.