Ed Miliband made a good speech to the party conference. The word he hit time and again was “values”. It’s a usefully resonant term, speaking of morality as well as of economy, trailing association with family and tradition and honesty. And he encapsulated it in a neatly turned soundbite: “the wrong values for our country and the wrong values for our time: that’s David Cameron”.
I also thought he dealt subtly with the first subject that the commentators always bring up, this notion that his poll ratings are relatively poor. Those of opposition leaders always are low through their early months because opportunities to embed their strengths in the public consciousness are few. Miliband’s first few pages harked back to JK Galbraith’s coining of the “conventional wisdom” as something to be shunned, and he gamely bracketed it with consensus. He gave Ed Balls generous credit for opposing the conventional wisdom on the economy twelve months ago at a time – though he didn’t spell this out (but he didn’t need to) – when he, Miliband, was passing over Balls as the natural shadow Chancellor in favour of Alan Johnson.
He took some pleasure in reminding us of the credit he won on all sides for his stance on the hacking scandal: “I knew I was breaking rule one of British politics: don’t mess with Rupert Murdoch”. And he cited his own immigrant background to ally himself with those who feel excluded from David Cameron’s phantom Big Society: “21st century Britain – still a country for the insiders”. He ambitiously described himself as “the guy who’s determined to break the closed circles of Britain … we must take on the vested interests wherever they are because that is how we defend the public interest”.
The NHS is always fuel for a Labour leader’s speech and he duly got plenty of traction from a dazzling riff that ended with “the oldest truth in British politics: you can’t trust the Tories on the National Health Service”. I thought the applause would never end.
He also got off some sharply wounding points against perceived enemies of the people: Sir Fred Goodwin, energy companies (“let’s call a rigged market what it is”), Southern Cross, “runaway rewards at the top”, Nick Clegg (knockabout stuff) and the PM: “only David Cameron could believe that you make ordinary families work harder by making them poorer and the rich work harder by making them richer”.
In committing the party to be “pro-business” and for “co-operation, not conflict”, he was making an impeccably Social Democrat pitch. However, this didn’t stop the BBC’s Nick Robinson anticipating “We Told You So: Red Ed” headlines in the papers tomorrow – the Tory press, presumably. But it should be good for all shades of opinion that he wants to make Britain primarily a manufacturing nation again: “not financial engineering but real engineering”. We can all support his campaign for apprenticeships and his determination to favour productive business over asset-stripping: “growth is built on sand if it comes from our predators and not our producers”.
But I feared that there was too much revisionism and that much of it is wrapped up with a need the Labour leadership feels to apologize for losing public support. It surely isn’t necessary specifically to repudiate past policy positions, especially ones that are three decades old. The coalition government daily justifies its mistakes and its dire policies by blaming Labour for the “mess” it left. The Labour leadership has already left it too long to nail this lie credibly. Now is not the time to start handing the Tories abject quotes to be further exploited against the last government’s record.
I don’t care for gesture politics. David Cameron evidently won a lot of credit for making a public statement of regret over Bloody Sunday. While I concede that he executed it graciously, I dispute that it cost him anything to do. He was five in 1972. Nobody blames him. The Heath government of the time was a very different beast from Cameron’s government and only four members of its cabinet are alive: Robert Carr (94), Peter Carrington (92), Margaret Thatcher (85 in a fortnight) and Jim Prior (84 in a fortnight). I don’t imagine that Cameron cleared his apology with any of them.
The “conventional wisdom” that Labour has much to apologize for is due for putting out to grass. It’s not the only old news. Jockeying the BBC’s live coverage of Miliband’s speech – disrupted, as was every other broadcaster’s, by a brief power failure at the Liverpool conference hall – Andrew Neil presumed to know what “people” think, as commentators are apt to do, for instance that they perceive Miliband as someone who “stabbed his brother in the back”. As a summary of the Labour leadership contest, it doesn’t survive five seconds of mature consideration. Anyway, why does no one suggest that Cameron stabbed David Davis in the back in order to win the Tory leadership?
Neil also banged on about the opinion poll ratings. As I tire of pointing out, opinion polls are a bankrupt pseudo-science, exemplified by Bob Worcester “calling” the 2004 US election for John Kerry quite late in the process on ITV. Look at the by-election results since the general election. Go on, look at them.
That Labour has missed some tricks under Miliband must be acknowledged. There are many ways of releasing public expenditure and easing the burden on the public, and most of them are rather more effective than a temporary lowering of VAT, the benefit of which is highly questionable. I fervently wish that Miliband and Labour had had the courage to oppose Cameron’s intervention in Libya. With his often quoted opposition to the Iraq invasion – at the time, not in retrospect – Miliband could have credibly articulated the case against the UK’s involvement.
Instead he declared that we could not “stand by” and watch Gaddafi killing his own citizens. Well, we stand by through many another repressive regime: Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Myanmar, Iran, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Russia, China. We do precious little to assist in those events that we call “natural disasters” but that we know are, at least in part, the result of man-made climate change: floods last year and this in Pakistan; floods and earthquakes in Australasia; earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan; tornados across the Caribbean and the southern States; famine in east Africa.
Yesterday, The Guardian scared up a defence analyst who reckoned that the cost to the British economy of Cameron’s self-serving strut upon the world stage, climaxed by his complaisant speech to the UN last week, will be in the order of £1.75bn. And don’t imagine that the British will not go on paying for months to come yet. At the London Conference on Libya in March, Cameron declared: “We must ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid where it is needed … when the fighting is over, we will need to put right the damage that Gaddafi has inflicted”.
My feeling is that there is little deep-seated support for this war among the electorate. Had Miliband stepped away from the consensus, the conventional wisdom, he could have given voice and point to this indifference and turned it into respect for his integrity. Now he and Balls could show persuasively that, under their policies, the government would have had at least £1.75bn to spend on stimulating growth, bolstering the NHS, reducing tuition fees or whatever domestic policy seemed most welcome to the electorate at the time. Cameron would have crowed for a few days when it seemed that his Libya policy had been “a success” but, besides pointing out that the Libya adventure, like that in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not over till it’s over and even then not without consequence, Miliband could have asked on a regular basis “at what cost”?
Labour should by now have worked up a programme of sources of revenue for encouraging the economy and never mind behaving as if they have accepted the Tories’ obsession with hauling down the deficit. Shadow ministers also might spend a bit more time pointing out that government expenditure is actually going up rather than coming down, instead of fatalistically accepting that it was Labour who went on a colossal spending spree.
So, although I like and admire Miliband, am glad he is the Labour leader and believe he can and will win the next election, I think he and his under-powered team should have inflicted rather more damage on the coalition. It’s certainly not too late to make up the lack.
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