Maurice Glasman’s New Statesman piece on Ed Miliband is causing a bit of a stir. Lord Glasman, an academic who Miliband proposed for a peerage, writes that the Labour leader ‘has not broken through. He has flickered rather than shone, nudged not led.’
But if you read between the lines of Glasman’s article it is clear that he thinks someone is holding Miliband back and he drops very heavy hints as to who that is. For instance, the second sentence reads as follows: ‘Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem stuck in defending Labour’s record in all the wrong ways – we didn’t spend too much money, we’ll cut less fast and less far, but we can’t tell you how.’ If that wasn’t enough of a clue, he adds that ‘Endogenous growth, flexible labour-market reform, free movement of labour, the dominance of the City of London — it was all crap, and we need to say so.’ He could only have been clearer if he had said it was all Balls.
Glasman and Balls do not have a good relationship. Soon after Glasman’s arrival in Parliament, and his emergence as one of the major intellectual influences on the Miliband project, Balls sent a messenger round to tell the peer to steer clear of economics.
But Glasman’s view that Balls is holding Miliband back is shared by several of Miliband’s closest allies. They worry that the shadow Chancellor is so obsessed with defending Labour’s record in office that he is drowning out what Miliband is trying to say about the future.
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