Nothing like a former PM poking their nose into your business, eh? John Major experienced what Daniel Finkelstein this week delicately described as ‘sub-optimal’ behaviour from Margaret Thatcher when he was in office, and today Ed Miliband has his own helpful little missive from his own former leader, telling him that if only he were just like Tony Blair, then everything would be OK.
Blair’s piece in the New Statesman isn’t surprising in many ways as it articulates the former Prime Minister’s firm belief that his party must engage with the centre of politics as it is at the moment, rather than trying to move that centre in the direction it would prefer. Blair warns Miliband of being overly optimistic about this, saying:
‘The paradox of the financial crisis is that, despite being widely held to have been caused by under-regulated markets, it has not brought a decisive shift to the left. But what might happen is that the left believes such a shift has occurred and behaves accordingly.’
Miliband’s response is a very polite way of saying ‘sod off’, with the gritted-teeth line ‘as [Blair] was the first to recognise, politics always has to move on to cope with new challenges and different circumstances’. It adds that ‘for example, on immigration, Labour is learning lessons about the mistakes in office and crafting an immigration policy that will make Britain’s diversity work for all, not just a few’. And another smack comes in the next line, with the statement saying that Miliband’s method ‘will win back people’s trust’. It would of course be churlish to point out that it was Gordon Brown who saw the voters lose trust in Labour in 2010, not Blair, but never mind about all that. It is just as Dan Hodges predicted it in his blog this morning when he said ‘and then they’ll start quietly briefing he’s a boring old man, whose time has been and gone’.
Miliband is in one respect right to stick his fingers in his ears and hum ‘I’ll do it my way’: he is trying to turn around Labour’s electoral fortunes over a five year period to take the party back into government at the 2015 election, not the 1997 election. Just as Thatcher enabled Blair, Blair enabled Cameron, and it’s Cameron that Miliband is fighting, not the 1990s Tories.
But the point that Blair makes about Labour risking becoming ‘the repository for people’s anger’ is echoed on Coffee House today by Jamie Reed. A party that really challenges the Tories won’t be one of protest, ‘the party opposing “Tory cuts”‘, as Blair puts it, but one that chooses. Reed points to some of the tenets of left wing politics in the late 70s that made it so very easy for Thatcher to steamroller over her opponents. Miliband’s One Nation Labour party will have to slay certain sacred cows to regain the lost trust in the same way as Tony Blair’s New Labour did.
The policy abattoir won’t be a particularly pleasant place to visit, and Miliband is trying to lead his party through it and package everything up neatly ready for sale to the electorate in a very short space of time. We’ve already started to see glimpses of what will happen to the party when it confronts its welfare policy, for instance. My hunch is that there will be a serious attempted insurrection against Liam Byrne in the next 12 months, possibly around the autumn conference when the policy reviews start to feed back.
But there’s also education policy: one of the more grisly moments at last autumn’s Labour conference came when one delegate decided to heckle a teenager giving a speech about her academy school. The delegate shouted that comprehensive schools offered the same things as this academy, and while she might have been no more representative of the party than some of the characters who turn up at any party conference, she echoed concerns about the neglect of comprehensive education that had been raised on the conference floor earlier in the week. At some point Stephen Twigg will be allowed to stop squirming and set out a clear policy on education. Will he, as Blair says, take the ‘education reforms of the last Labour government to a new level, given the huge improvement in results they brought about?’ It is awkwardly easy to argue that this is exactly what Michael Gove is doing: will Twigg follow? And how will the party cope with the outcry that could ensue? Miliband will be wary of divisions over sacred cows turning his party into what Reed described as a ‘wretched, shambolic, incoherent wreck’ that its opponents crushed back in 1979. But he also has to address them to take his party into government in a fit state, and he has to work out how to address them with as little bloodshed as he can manage.
Any one of the seven questions that Blair poses will send the party into paroxysms (including the rather quirky ‘what could the developments around DNA do to cut crime?’), but even if Miliband wants to ignore the argument about the centre ground, he should see these points as a guide to some of the difficult decisions he is going to have to make in the policy abattoir.
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