There are apparently two Labour MPs who have called for Ed Miliband to step aside. That just two from Ed Miliband’s party are openly moving against him while some estimates put the number of letters calling for a vote of no confidence in David Cameron at 22 shows the difference in personality and practice between the two parties. Labour is markedly unhappier than the Tories (who don’t resemble sunbeams themselves at present), and Ed Miliband polls below his party, while the opposite is true for David Cameron.
Labour is not a party that manages to pull off pre-election regicide that effectively. For the past few years in opposition, it hasn’t even been a party where open dissent is that common. Even its vocal awkward squad who don’t mind the consequences of criticising the leader is smaller than the one in the Conservative party. There are a number of reasons for this. The first is that Labourites tend to be much more tribal than Tories and are therefore that much more reluctant to break ranks. The second is that though Miliband polls below his party in the public’s eyes, he does bother to talk to his MPs and make them feel included and valued. The absence of this effort has been a major driver of Tory dissent over the past few years.
And the third is that when anyone in Labour so much as pulls a face that suggests they might criticise their leader, they find a ton of bricks landing on top of them pretty quickly. Even modest public criticism is treated tremendously seriously: those who have stepped out of line or expressed anxiety about next year have been told they are traitors, that they are no longer friends of the party. Others who have made points they thought quite innocuous but which were not part of the planned ‘line’ have been threatened with a sudden change in their career trajectory or have found there’s no longer any help or resources available for the projects they are working on.
Now, this all sounds rather Sicilian. But it does mean that anyone who does speak up has to think long and hard about the consequences, and therefore Labourites don’t publish critical blogs and say exactly what they think on the Daily Politics as Tory MPs do on a daily basis. Imagine, for instance, if a Labour frontbencher had said what Nicky Morgan did about her party at a public meeting. They probably wouldn’t have received the stellar promotion that took the then Treasury Minister to the Education department.
But this loyalty within Labour ranks, whether sincere or cultivated by fear, means we must look at the party in a slightly different way. Just as the Tory party can be both chaotic and happy (they’re in a slightly more muddled place at the moment), so Labour can be openly united and privately miserable. Two Labour MPs pushing PLP chair Dave Watts on Miliband’s leadership is in this context more significant than a pile of letters in Graham Brady’s desk.
Those two MPs are still unlikely to get what they want before the election, though. Most of those who are unhappy with Miliband think he is wounded, not slain, by this terrible autumn season that he’s had. What this may mean in practice is that some more Labour MPs think the consequences of speaking out are still not as bad as the consequences of their party going into the General Election in its current shape. And it will also probably mean that the Shadow Cabinet members who Team Miliband suspects think more about their own futures than about their current leader will jostle about a bit more. If you were Andy Burnham, for instance, you might conclude that your leader is sufficiently weak and your threat sufficiently strong for you to bag many more policy concessions than you should do. It’s worth keeping an eye on every comment that Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper make for the same reason.
The BBC said today that Ed Miliband will try to address some of the criticisms levelled at him in a statement this afternoon. Labour sources say he will instead be talking about bus regulation (though the word ‘bus’ might make some Peter Bone-esque types think he is talking about his leadership anyway).
Taking questions at Northampton College on how we can fix local transport – people here need buses they can rely on. pic.twitter.com/oFkHJ3M1v8
— Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) November 6, 2014
Miliband has just tweeted about his afternoon session on local transport, saying ‘people here need buses they can rely on’. His own party does seem to be concluding that it needs a leader it can rely on too.
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