The Uselessness of David Miliband

I have always been of the view that, hopeless though Ed Miliband may be, his older brother, David, certainly was not deserving of the Labour leadership himself. He twice bottled the chance to pursue the leadership when it meant challenging the collapsing Brown regime, and seemed to think it was his by divine right when he did finally manage to stand. In the Telegraph yesterday Matthew Norman deploys his journalistic skills to comprehensively demolish any thought that Miliband senior is some kind of eminence grise of the left. On the tactic of making would-be challenging noises and then running away, Norman writes:

"This week, Milibandroid the Elder has mostly been playing Knock Down Ginger, and the sense of déjà vu is overwhelming. It never varies. He charges up to the door and boldly rings the bell, but at the first sound of footsteps from within, he scuttles away and hides in the bushes sucking his thumb.

The pattern was set in the summer of 2008, when David wrote a barely coded article in the Guardian – well, it wouldn’t have taxed the folk at Bletchley Park – justly lacerating Gordon Brown. The moment it was greeted as the challenge to the PM’s authority that it certainly was, off he scarpered, denying any such intent.

Within a year, his close friend and Cabinet ally James Purnell resigned, laying the ground for David to oust Mr Brown by doing the same. Again he bottled it, and stayed. Now, the former foreign secretary has exposed that giant, banana-coloured streak for a third time, by way of an article in the New Statesman, and his response to the reaction it inevitably provoked. "

Norman goes on to demolish Miliband's current article for the New Statesman. This is really David Miliband's defence of the New Labour project against Roy Hattersley, who wrote of a need to return to social democracy in the pages of Political Quarterly. Actually, the real problem of Miliband's article, in which he praises his brother's leadership on three separate occasions - just so we're clear - is that it doesn't really say anything at all. It's as woolly and all-embracing as some of Blair's finest speeches without ever striking out in a clear, coherent direction of its own. If this really is the best that the heir to New Labour can produce, then the whole project is as dead in the water as David Miliband's leadership hopes always were.

NB - There is a robust defence of social democracy by Dr. Kevin Hickson on the Fabian Society blog here.

Peter Mandelson's Honesty

Not many people are actually feeling very welcoming towards the good baron at the moment. Last October it almost seemed as if the Labour Party had really begun to love him. I'd hate to put him up in front of a Labour audience now. On the other hand, it is difficult to see why conservative commentators like Peter Oborne are so vigorously against him. Mandelson's vial of regurgitated poison is giving the coalition a further honeymoon lease.......ah, that'd be the reason then! His memoirs, though, certainly don't deserve the bile being directed towards them by those not directly implicated in his tale of treachery and deception. Unlike many memoirists, Mandelson is not making some sort of claim to higher reality in justifying his fast off the presses tome.

Mandelson has never made any claims to some spurious form of moral authority; he doesn't preach at us from some mythical pulpit; he has always been a manipulative spinner, a master of the dark arts of politics and his book is, in a sense, a vindication of that. What better time to dish the dirt - Mandelson's whole raison d'etre - than immediately following his party's defeat? It is not actually, on the strength of the Times extracts, particularly revelatory, but who would deny Lord M his last bit of fun. He's being doing this sort of stuff as a professional for years, and his book is just Mandelson being Mandelson. He is not offering us some spurious, righteous justification for his words. He is simply giving us politics in the raw. And there's a rare honesty in that!

Unhappy Labourites

The chairman of the left-wing Compass group, Neal Lawson, has issued the following assessment of last Thursday, under the heading 'Results mark death knell for New Labour'. I'm trying to work out whether that is intended as an opitmistic headline for them or not. Read and see:

It’s been a bad and bruising encounter for Labour. 27 per cent of the votes cast is a miserable tally. Just one per cent up on Labour’s worst result ever. This is not an opinion poll. These are real votes cast by real people. The Tories have consolidated above the 40% barrier and are inexorably shifting from hung parliament territory to potential out right winners at the next election. This can and must be reversed. But it demands the party changes.

Natural Labour supporters have been put off voting for their party because of a toxic combination of Blair, Iraq, sleaze and what’s happening to public services. All of this was avoidable. We said after the 2005 election victory that Blair should go and that if he insisted on prolonging his premiership he would damage the party and the country. The hard work of thousands of councillors and party activists around the country has been undone by a Prime Minister who out stayed his welcome. Where now are the people who said Blair should stay for a full term?

These elections signal the death knell for the politics of Blairism. We have lost five million votes since 1997 - mostly from our traditional base, who no longer feel able to turn out for us and stay at home or protest through the Greens, Liberal Democrats or others. Now Cameron threatens to drain away middle class support - creating a pincer movement that could be devastating for Labour MPs at the next election.

The Party cannot go on run as a tight clique, commercialising public services and playing the nodding dog to George Bush. It is not just Compass that demands a change of direction but the country. Let’s be clear – unless there is a break with Blairism Labour will lose the next election. That means the modernisation of hospitals and schools based the ethos of public services; it means less flexible labour markets; a shift towards Europe; a reconnection with the people of the country through democratic reform and with party members by starting to listen to them. We forgot that we are the servants. On new issues like the environment, well-being and quality of life we have got to get ahead of the Tories and stop lagging behind. All of this can be done and a forth victory secured – but not just through a change of leader – only though a change of direction.

The loss of hundreds of councillors and members will be a hammer blow to local parties. In Labour’s depleted party ranks, councillors tended to be the people who have kept the campaigns and the canvassing going. They are the ones linked into local communities, supporting Labour MPs and keeping the party alive. They are the fabric of the party. The Tory party had lost its councillor base by the early 1990s and the national party crumbled soon after.
Jon Cruddas is the only candidate on the ballot paper for the new leadership who understands the depth of the hole we are in and has the commitment and the plan for the renewal of the Labour party. Others, who have been in the Cabinet and the leadership team, have allowed the party to whither. Now we must chose change.