Perhaps I’m being a little unfair on Ed Miliband but, no, I don’t think I am. Perhaps he’s not in denial. There again, he gives every impression of being a man who still doesn’t understand why Labour lost the last election.
Every so often there’ll be a nod to the notion that government spending cannot increase by several points above inflation every year but this is lost in the candyfloss of reassurance he serves (not sells, obviously) to Labour’s most devoted supporters. The occasional aside that some spending restraint or retrenchment might be necessary seems dutiful; the thrust of speeches suggests his heart lies elsewhere.
That’s fine. It’s not an illegitimate view. But nor is it persuasive. Bagehot has a magnificent post reporting from something called Labour’s “People’s Policy Forum” in Nottingham. It does not sound as though it was an encouraging event:
For hour after hour, in policy session after policy session, Mr Miliband and his shadow ministerial team were bombarded with angry, self-righteous demands for Labour to wave a magic wand and make the cuts go away.
Denial does not begin to cover the mood in Nottingham. This was more like a gathering of exiled loyalists after a revolution, demanding to be led back to the promised homeland by their battered, bloodied chiefs.
This, buttresssed by the examples Bagehot cites of deluded Labour supporters arguing that there’s no need for any public spending restraint even though debt interest now costs more each day than education, is both persuasive and a reminder that, like the Tories in 1997, many Labour supporters have yet to come to terms with the consequences of losing an election. There is a sense that if only it had not been for that dreadful Mr Blair things might have gone better. It’s a dreadful combination of complacency, hatred and smugness.
And victimhood. As Philip Collins wrote in the Times last week:
It’s the emotional signature of the oppositionalist for whom slogans stand for deeds. He [the oppositionalist] is someone whose moral righteousness only increases the more it falls on deaf ears. The infuriatingly unrealistic nature of his demands should alert you to the fact that, if by some miracle he should succeed, he would lose the cause that animates his moral superiority. What he wants is forever to fall short, so that he can continue, in the torrent of military metaphors that you find on every anti-cuts website, “the fight” or “the struggle”.
Indeed. But this is Miliband Minor’s comfort zone. As an intelligent man he must know it is nonsense just as William Hague must, surely, have known that the Tory grass roots were pushing him towards nonsense and denial too. Hague is older and wiser now and perhaps Miliband will be one day too but when that day arrives he won’t, on current form, be leader of the Labour party. But like Gordon Brown Miliband seems to enjoy the pleaures of self-determined victimhood.
Bagehot and Collins each capture something else: the Labour movement’s unsinkable sense of its own moral superiority. Their enemies are not misguided but wicked. Disagreement in good faith is impossible. One of David Cameron’s more pleasing attributes is a certain generosity of spirit. It might be going a little too far to say Tony Blair enjoyed comparable dollops of that quality but he was capable of recognising that decent people could be Conservatives too. Gordon Brown, a sectarian if ever there was one, could never appreciate that. And that failure of imagination played a large part in his failure as a Prime Minister. He was a tactician but Prime Ministers need to be strategists.
Of course some Tories have a certain arrogance, or style, that displeases many people but if the Conservative party really is – or was – the Church of England at prayer then Labour, especially under Brown, favoured a kind of superior, hectoring protestantism*. A grim combination of methodism and presbyterianism if you like. (Thatcher, of course, shared something of this but those, my friends, were different times and, anyway, the shortcomings of her approach became evident in the end.)
Cocoons trap politicians and any leader who lives in one is doomed. Ed Miliband shows few signs of recognising that he’s in a cocoon, far less that it might be important for him to break out of it. At present he appears to have almost no interest in speaking to people who did not vote Labour at the last election. The sole exception to this is, perhaps, those deluded Lib Dem voters who deserted Labour on the grounds that Blair is a “war criminal” and, anyway, disgustingly right-wing. (As readers know I think Nick Clegg is well shot of these types.)
Perhaps there is more to Miliband than I can see. But I’ve never been persuaded by him. If he doesn’t share the views of his Flat Earth supporters he’s too timid to make his disagreement clear; if he does share them he’s hopelessly deluded. Neither part of this seems a promising platform for government. He also seems desperately feeble:
I grew up in the 1980s, now I thought some of the music of the 1980s was quite good. But I thought the politics of the 1980s were rotten. I thought they were rotten because they divided our country and I fear we are seeing our country divided again. I fear that this government is practising the politics of division. They’re saying to the bankers, well you can have a tax cut this year and you can carry on having your bonuses but they’re saying to everyone else, you’re going to have to pay the price of the economic crisis that the bankers caused. They’re saying people in the public sector and people in the private sector should somehow be at odds. They’re saying people on benefits should be resented by those in work. They’re saying we should set north against south.
This is aggravating in many ways and not just because of that prissy “quite” in the first sentence or because, like any sensible fellow, I prefer setting east against west. No, it’s this clammy, chummy notion that “division” is a bad thing. What Miliband means, of course, is the regrettable tendency of many of his fellow Britons to disagree with him. Moreover, if the 1980s really were all about dividing the country that may have had something to do with the madness of Labour in those years. For that matter, the Blair-Brown ministry was quite divisive too.
More to the point it is meaningless guff and, worse still, deceitful nonsense. Never mind that George Osborne denied the bank, and the banks alone, a corporation tax cut. Never mind that many people in the private sector really do envy the pay and conditions and job security of those drawing government salaries. Never mind that many of the employed really do think it would be good if the unemployed were in work or that housing benefit be restructured. Never mind that the notion mere disagreement is a minor act of treachery – a staple of the Labour years – is grotesque. No, you can be sure that a politician prattling on about “the politics of division” is a politician with nothing useful to say or, even worse, sell.
But that’s Ed Miliband. Next on his agenda: promising every six year-old girl in the country a pony. Or a unicorn.
*Like many other folk, I struggle to see the Church of England as proper protestantism. It is an agreeable half-way house, possessing few of the virtues of Catholicism or Calvinism but, rather importantly, few of their dreadful vices either.
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