Why Labour will Lose: the damage done by idealism – an essay in process language. 1
Figurations in the Labour Party committed political suicide and let down those who need them: Michael Foot and Ed Miliband?
- Ed Miliband – what a mess!
You could see and hear in Ed Miliband’s Tuesday speech of Labour’s 2014 party conference why Cameron’s Tory figuration would win in 2015. Labour leaders seemed paralysed by issues of Scottish independence at referendum time. For me its later stages were lit up by an old soldier’s return to battle as Gordon Brown threw off his post-prime ministerial anonymity to take on those who wanted independence. It was great to see him striding around a political platform having licked his wounds for long enough. There was no posturing or ambiguity here, we could see it mattered. He came out fighting with a passion, until then, only displayed by Yes campaigners. His visceral performances arguably stemmed a damaging flow of voters away from saying ‘No’, sufficient to avoid defeat.
Brown’s strident conviction deployed with such effect contrasted markedly with that of his successor. What I saw from Ed Miliband at Labour’s conference in 2014 was a diffident, unconvincing display of a man totally out of his depth, short on charisma and an ability to put together a team that could develop a set of policies needed to win an election. Miliband was a man lost, leading a shadow cabinet mostly as inept as he was. Miliband’s figuration had four years to develop a manifesto fit to send packing a governing coalition formed in 2010 of a defensive, uncosy alliance working with a legacy of banking catastrophes and business collapse. Subsequently, coalition partners over-borrowed and over-borrowed whilst cutting and cutting and cutting. Labour was their only substantive alternative and should have been out of sight by September 2014, preparing for electoral victory in May. Instead they were playing for time, executing what amounted to little more than a tactical defence focussed on exploiting government weaknesses or spewing out tawdry mantras of idealistic nonsense such as ‘togetherness’ which just paraphrased a Tory slogan: ‘we’re all in it together’. Labour people were working safe NHS ground like a dazed boxer hoping to throw a lucky punch – team Miliband looked beaten.