The next election is now less than ten months
away, and is set to be perhaps the most unpredictable in decades. Labour still
has a fairly stable lead, but late swings to the government are often seen
closer to the time, raising the prospect of another hung parliament or Tory-led
government if we are not careful. In recent months, the issue of Ed Miliband’s
leadership
has also flared up - just this week, the Evening Standard has claimed he is the leader the public would least like to meet on holiday - though if the Labour movement is honest with itself, these
questions had never truly “gone away” since he was elected in 2010. This makes
it clear that if Labour is to win, it must make the rest of the country certain
of Ed’s capabilities as a potential Prime Minister. So here, as someone who backed
Ed Miliband then and still does, I state my four-point case.
1. He has a new vision for a reformed society
Ed Miliband has a bold vision to change
Britain’s society, our economy and government to address the fundamental
structural problems we suffer from. These problems have been long in the making
and won’t be easy to fix, but the flaws in the very foundations of our economy have
become painfully clear since the crisis of 2008. Similarly, the rot at the
heart of our government has also come into sharp focus, thanks to events like
the expenses scandal of 2009.
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| Ed Miliband and his infrastructure guru Lord Adonis launch the Adonis Review at the Airedale International plant, Leeds (from Flickr) |
Ed and his team believe that we should decentralise power in Britain – this
will mean strengthening local government, community organisations like cooperatives,
and local businesses. On the economic front, greater powers to raise and spend public money at the
city, county or regional level will allow local council leaders spend money based on
immediate economic needs. This will strengthen local economies and help the
SMEs that live within them, gradually making our economy less London-centric,
less dominated by larger or multinational corporations and, crucially, less
dependent on financial services and property (a key factor in 2008). On the
political front, a greater role for local government and communities will give
people greater say over the public services they rely on and the way that their
taxpayer money is spent, improving accountability and repairing the tattered
relationship between people and the public officials.
Ed also believes that the Britain’s
compassionate welfare state, the one which Labour proudly founded in 1945,
needs to change if it is to survive. The public now feel that the link between contribution and benefits and the “something for
something”
pact underpinning welfare have been eroded over time. Some people pay National
Insurance and contribute to their communities their entire lives, only to see
those who seem to have put in less getting more, or sometimes abusing the
system outright. To address this, Labour has suggested that those who have paid
into the system for longer should be properly compensated when they fall on
hard times and that an individual’s work in the community should be taken into
account when they are waiting for social housing, for example. At the same time,
Ed Miliband’s broader economic reforms will aim to ensure that stable,
well-paid work is available for all again. This is the fairest and most
sensible way to make sure that welfare goes back to being a social security mechanism,
not a way of life. In the process, it will reduce the benefits bill, cutting the deficit.
However, while Ed Miliband believes that
government needs to be decentralised and reformed, and while he also knows that
being prudent with spending will be vital if he is going to eliminate our deficit
by 2019
like he and Ed Balls have promised to do, he nevertheless believes that
government has a productive role to play in society. This is the overriding
difference between him and David Cameron.
Ed still wants government to use its unique powers
to break up and regionalise our ‘too big to fail’
banking sector,
to tackle tax avoidance and to take on the
monopolistic utilities providers and train companies that rip off British consumers.
He believes only the government can ensure the big long-term investments needed
for key economic infrastructure, such as transport. He believes government can
tackle the growing inequality in our society by promoting simple “pre-distributive” economic measures
like the Living Wage, which will make work
pay. He believes it can also use tax incentives and its huge contracting
powers to promote more responsible corporate behaviour and create more
apprenticeships
for struggling young people. And above all, Ed still believes that a good education can be the silver
bullet that gives even the most disadvantaged child the hope of a better life,
and that our treasured National Health Service needs to be well-funded and geared to the
needs of an ageing population.
That is Ed’s One Nation vision for our society
– a fairer and more balanced economy, supported by a reliable, responsive and
trustworthy state. A plan this wide-ranging will take years to bring about and
can sometimes be hard to break down into the sort of digestible sound-bites the
media likes to hear. But it is clear, it is well-thought out and achievable – a
plan for us all to aspire to.
2. He will secure our national identity
On top of tackling the core challenges ordinary
people have faced in our economy and with our state, Ed’s One Nation Labour
project is also addressing Britain’s deep-seated cultural and social insecurities,
which Labour has all too often ignored in the past.
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| Ed speaks about One Nation Labour, 2013 (from Flickr) |
To do this, Ed has had to take on and defeat
two powerful orthodoxies in Labour. One the one hand, figures associated with
the traditional left have often misread
and derided this part of the One Nation agenda as xenophobic, chauvinist and
“pale, male and stale”. But perhaps more importantly, Ed has also had to
convince the guardians of New Labour - typically portrayed as more in touch
with “middle England” than him - to come round to his view on these matters. For example, it was Tony Blair who wrote
off Ed
Miliband’s hope to address widespread anxiety on matters like immigration and
globalisation as the “Labour equivalent of warm
beer and old maids bicycling” (a derisive reference to John Major’s “back
to basics” small-c conservatism). Ed’s firm stand on this, against both
Labour’s old left and its neo-liberal Blairite right, is one of the clearest
signs of his distinctive ‘Milibandite’ vision. In his very first conference speech, it was exactly this
that Ed was speaking of when he called for the party to move beyond New Labour:
“The world was changing all around us - from global finance
to immigration to terrorism - New Labour, a political force founded on its
ability to adapt and change, lost its ability to do so. The reason was that we
too often bought old, established ways of thinking and over time, we just
looked more and more like a new establishment”
Labour was often seen to shut down debate on
immigration in the Blair era, and there are still too
many on the left who are deeply uncomfortable on the subject. But it is a top concern for the public, one
that has left the working class feeling insecure and pushed lifelong Labour
voters into the arms of the Tories and UKIP. Ed Miliband is a son of Jewish refugees who fled here amid
the Holocaust, and so is a product of Britain’s noble tradition of taking in
those who are in need and willing to work hard to make a life here. Ed’s anger when the Daily Mail slandered his Navy veteran
father was understandable for this very reason, and he has been equally willing
to go toe-to-toe with UKIP when some of Nigel
Farage’s rhetoric has crossed the line of acceptability. Ed
also believes migrants can still make a valuable contribution to our NHS and
public services, and that the Tories’ overly simplistic ‘cap’ approach has
harmed our economy, for example by deterring foreign students and investors.
However, Ed has also made clear that Labour
needs to understand that widespread public concern about immigration is not
simply about prejudice and cannot be ignored. He has admitted Labour got it badly
wrong about the scale of Eastern European migration, and that we need stronger
EU transition controls. He has pledged that a Labour government will reduce non-EU migration, prevent employers using migrant labour
to undercut the minimum wage - which harms British workers and migrants alike -
and will guarantee that those who do settle here must learn English, as this is vital for
cohesion. This is the only way we will make immigration work for Britain.
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| Ed campaigns on a soapbox, 2013 (from Flickr) |
Ed also wants to address the questions that
face our historic union, like the illusive concept of ‘Britishness’ and the place of English nationalism within it. As well as
kick-starting our imbalanced economy and making our public services responsive,
his plans to grant far more powers to England’s localities
and regions
will also help to address its place in the union, answering the call for more
devolution without resort to an expensive,
over-centralised new English Parliament. At the same time, Labour backs more
powers for the Welsh Assembly. And as we speak, Labour’s leadership is proving critical
in seeing-off the single greatest challenge to the stability of our United
Kingdom - Scottish independence. David Cameron and the Tories, long since
having lost their way as a One Nation party, have been unable to confront Alex
Salmond’s reckless populism due to their
unpopularity north of the border. Instead, it is thanks to former Labour
Chancellor Alastair Darling’s sterling efforts that the smart money remains on
our 307 year-old union probably enduring. One Nation Labour is ensuring that we
will not lose 5.3 million citizens, one-third our territory and 8.3% of our tax
base (not counting North Sea oil)
overnight in September.
Finally, Ed Miliband has sought to set a
course on what our membership of Europe should, and shouldn’t, mean to Britons.
Ed is clear that EU membership remains a non-negotiable part of our national
interest, for several simple reasons. We are stronger economically when we are
part of the world’s single-largest trading bloc, we are taken more seriously by
key partners such as the US and China as a member, and we are more able to protect
ourselves against modern security threats like terrorism, organised crime, pandemics
and climate change when we work with our European partners. This is why Ed’s
instinct as a leader has been to resist the call for an immediate
in-out referendum, because he doesn’t think Britain should play with fire when
our economy is still weak and our world is increasingly unstable.
But just as with immigration, Ed knows that
the fact that the EU is a net benefit for the UK doesn’t mean that Labour can
be blind to its flaws or public unease. This is why Labour has stood against
further integration into the EU, both opposing Jean-Claude Juncker for
Commission President and refusing to back the Party of European Socialists’ own
pro-integration Commission candidate, Martin Schulz of Germany. Ed has pledged that next time a treaty change
occurs that transfers additional sovereignty to Brussels, the British public
will get an in-out referendum on the matter. Labour is calling for
reforms
that will give Britain more veto over Brussels policies that go against our
interests, including a “red card” system where any initiative opposed by
several national governments will be automatically defeated. Labour and its
trade union partners are working to ensure that the Trans-Atlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade deal with the USA will protect key services
like the NHS from forced privatisation. And when David Cameron called for the EU
budget to be frozen, Ed Miliband instead ordered Labour’s Westminster MPs and MEPs to vote for an outright cut in the budget, as if we
face tough spending decisions at home, it is only fair that the same happens in
Brussels.
So that will be Ed Miliband’s Britain. Tough,
smart and fair on immigration. Highly engaged in Brussels, but not a slave to
it. And secure in a more devolved, but more stable, United Kingdom.
3. He will be a strong leader in the world
A key aspect of the premiership is to be
Britain’s face in the world and the civilian head of our armed forces, our
“commander in chief”, as the Americans would call it. It’s always been hard for
Labour to win on these issues, even in the New Labour years (Tony Blair was
initially nicknamed “bambi” in 1997, hard as that
is to comprehend now). Nevertheless, Labour still needs to lay out its case.
Here’s why we should all be at ease with Prime Minister Miliband leading Britain
in the world.
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| Ed Miliband meets with UK officials in Helmand, Afghanistan, May 2012 (from Flickr) |
First and foremost, on the biggest foreign
policy decision of our time, Ed called it right when most of Labour and
Conservative frontbenchers got it badly wrong. In 2003 while away teaching at
Harvard University, Ed tried to persuade
close friends that Blair was wrong to be siding with Bush on Iraq and UN
inspectors needed more time to check for WMDs. He even called Gordon Brown,
urging him to stop the march to war. For this reason alone, electing him leader
was a wise decision, much as how Americans opted for Obama in 2008 over the
pro-invasion opponents he faced in the primary and general elections.
Further, one of Ed’s first acts as Labour
leader was to state clearly that the war was a mistake and
something Labour needed to draw a line under, something his brother was reluctant to
do. Going down the road untraveled, it is hard not to wonder whether David
Miliband’s support for the war would have haunted Labour this year when the ISIS-inflicted
chaos in Iraq rose to the top of news agenda. On the road we did take, Ed’s stance
had certainly shown his profound judgement.
Even where I have personally disagreed with
Ed’s foreign policy conclusions, most notably on Syria
last year and this year on
Gaza, I respect that he has made his voice heard as an opposition leader,
brought
significant pressure to bear on the government and spoken from principle and
for much of the public. Ed has now
made clear that a cornerstone of Labour’s defence policy will be the
renewal of Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent – this is again something I have
personally had
questions about, but I do recognize it shows Miliband’s resolve to offer
continuity and security to the public in a time of global turmoil. No one could
say he was weak on these issues or ineffectual in his advocacy for them, and I
am confident that Ed will put these abilities to good use in the many areas
where his views are more closely aligned with my own.
Ed Miliband has also led a Labour Party that
has sought to remind people that we are the true party of
national defence - it was the reforming left-wing Attlee government that
brought Britain into NATO and authorised our original nuclear deterrent, after
all. Labour has spoken out against coalition
cutbacks that have made over 30,000 military personnel unemployed, cost more than they
have actually saved
and prompted warnings about both our joint operability with
the US
and about our ability to defend the Falklands in a hypothetical
second conflict (we’ve also been here before – it’s too often
forgotten that Tory defence austerity rendered the Falklands open to attack the
first time around and left our squaddies nicknamed “the borrowers” by their
Gulf War allies in 1991).
Labour is laying out an alternative
plan for a 21st century defence posture, one which will re-strengthen our
forces while tackling new threats like cyber-warfare.
The party has founded Labour
Friends of the Forces to improve Labour’s relationship with the community
and make it easier to recruit Labour MPs from forces backgrounds. Charismatic ex-Para Dan Jarvis MP is now
a member of Ed’s front bench team, and after May, he will be joined by talented
veterans like Sophy Gardner, Jon Wheale and Clive
Lewis. And at home, Labour wants to strengthen financial
and medical support for our servicemen and women and will make discrimination
against them a crime, to better protect them from extremist groups like Luton’s Islam4UK.
Finally, the measure of a leader is someone
who can do, not just say. At the 2009 Copenhagen Summit on climate change,
then-Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband was Britain’s
man at the negotiating table. Green issues might not always be at the forefront
of voters’ minds, but it’s hard to say that even any of our biggest immediate
challenges are as severe as the long-term threat the planet we all have to live
on is facing. The UN-backed
Copenhagen Accord brought Britain together with the US, China, India, South
Africa, Brazil and the EU. It made sustainable growth an international priority
and committed these diverse countries to better transparency standards,
ensuring that everyone else is playing by the same rules as Britain.
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| Ed & Douglas Alexander MP at the Copenhagen Summit, 2009 (from Flickr) |
During the Copenhagen negotiations, Ed
Miliband was also clear about Britain’s goals and took no prisoners when they
were under threat – at one point he warned other delegates “We’re
now getting close to midnight in this negotiation and we need to act like it.
That means more urgency to solve problems, not just identify them, more
willingness to shift from entrenched positions and more ambitious commitments.”
Speaking truth to world power, Miliband specifically called out China for its
unconstructive opposition to a deal, uncowed by Beijing’s rising position in
the world. Environmental journalist Fred Pearce went as far as to
credit Ed Miliband with saving the accord at the last minute with one of his
interventions.
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| Ed & shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander meet with President Barack Obama, July 2014 (Flickr) |
So, Ed Miliband was one of the few at the top
who had the judgement and foresight to oppose perhaps the greatest foreign
policy mistake of our generation. He has been clear in his stances on
international affairs, even when I have occasionally found myself in
disagreement with him. He will keep Trident, is challenging a reckless Tory-led
government that assumes it deserves the public’s trust on national defence, and
will look after our returning heroes. And at Copenhagen, he was a strong
negotiator who took on the world’s great powers to secure a fair deal for
Britain that would protect our environment. Beyond doubt, he is qualified to be
our face in the world.
4. Ed as person: honest, in-touch and experienced
Lastly, even putting his vision for the
country and policy positions aside, Ed is also to be respected simply for his
fundamental decency and talent as a person. For all the flack he takes from the
press, you wouldn’t know that research has found that the public feel this
somewhat as well. While they may have other doubts about him, the people have
consistently rated Ed
as both more honest and more in touch with ordinary people than David
Cameron.
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| Ed with his wife, Justine Thornton meeting people at the National Council of Voluntary Organisations, 2011 (Flickr) |
To me, Ed’s essential honesty shined through
in one of the darkest moments in British politics. Amid the expenses scandal in
2009, the right-leaning Telegraph
rated him as one of the
few “saint” MPs (one who made only a small amount of the basic office
claims that the system was intended for). It’s also a matter of public record
that both David
Cameron and some of Ed’s Labour leadership rivals had less than stellar records.
Now granted, some have pointed out to me that this is at best a relative virtue
– “Ed: not corrupt like the others” isn’t a slogan that should send any voter
running to their nearest polling station. But all the same, the fact that Ed
resisted the flimsy, “everyone-else-is-at-it” moral relativism that his
colleagues mostly fell prey to is a small hint of the strength of his personal
character. More importantly, it also puts him in a much better starting
position to be the sincere reformer British politics now so desperately needs.
The fact the public see Ed as more in touch
is also significant. Yes, Ed comes from a north London academic family, and his
upbringing was steeped in politics, thanks to his father’s left-wing
associations. But that upbringing still taught him the One Nation values he
feels are shared by
Britain at large:
“I want to talk to you about the idea of One Nation. The
idea of a country which we rebuild together, where everyone plays their part…It
is rooted deep in the soul of the British people. Deep in the daily way we go
about our lives. Our relationships with our family, our friends, our
neighbours. We know this idea is a deep part of our national story because we
have so many different ways of describing it. “All hands to the pump.” “Mucking
in.” “Pulling your weight.” “Doing your bit.” And every day we see it at work
in our country. On Christmas Day, I helped out somebody down the street from me
who makes Christmas lunches for elderly people in the area living on their own,
it’s that spirit.”
In one simple aspect of his life, Ed is also far
closer to most of us than much of our current political class - he spent his
formative years at a state
comprehensive, Haverstock. The public often complain that too many of our politicians
come from elite institutions, not because they are envious, but simply because
they want politicians who understand their own constituents’ daily lives and
struggles. Only about 7% of the public attend fee-paying
private schools. 34% of our MPs, 54% of Tory MPs, and
all three of the other party leaders -
Cameron, Clegg and Farage - did. Some of Ed’s critics have sometimes tried to portray
Haverstock Comprehensive as a kind of fashionable “Eton of the left”, though
former pupil Andrew Anthony has been less
complementary about the conditions at the school around that time (“although
it's true that in the 70s the school contained a significant minority of
children from the Hampstead and Primrose Hill intelligentsia, violence was rife
in and out of the classroom, police were regularly called to the school gates
to quell mass fights, and the ethos was embarrassingly unacademic”). This basic
bit of life experience is one that Ed has been able to speak about:
“I went to my local comprehensive with people from all
backgrounds. I still remember the amazing and inspiring teaching I got at that
school…It was a really tough school, but order was kept by one of the scariest
headmistresses you could possibly imagine, Mrs Jenkins…I wouldn’t be standing
on this stage today without my comprehensive school education”
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| The modern Haverstock School, where Ed went in the 80s (Flickr) |
I also want to defend Ed’s
personal character on another point. Ed has often been accused of unfair play and jibed
in PMQs, simply because he dared to stand for the leadership in 2010 at the
same time as David Miliband. The reason I’ve always found this charge ridiculous
is simple - it was a democratic leadership election, in which any Labour MP who
thought they had what it took was entitled to stand. The tacit implication that
David somehow had “more right” to be leader, seemingly without having to prove
it in open competition, goes against my values as both a Briton and a Labour
member. What’s more, evidence has again shown that Ed’s critics have been out of
touch with the public here anyway – YouGov found 58% agreed "there
was nothing wrong with Ed Miliband standing against his brother and seeing who
won" (only 17%, mostly Tories, actually disagreed).
Meanwhile, Ed’s fierce intelligence, varied life
experience and devotion to public service can never be in doubt. As a teenager,
he was a
reviewer for the LBC Radio show Young
London, and spent part of his childhood in America (he is still a fan of
the Boston Redsox baseball team). Studying hard at Haverstock, he left with A
Levels in maths, physics and English, before going on to study Philosophy,
Politics and Economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. A few years later, he
would also earn a master’s degree in Economics from the LSE. After university,
Ed briefly worked for Channel 4, but was soon recruited as an economic
researcher for the Labour opposition’s frontbench Treasury team – in this role,
Miliband crafted Blair, Brown and New Labour’s election-winning economic
policies for 1997 and beyond.
In 2002-2003, Ed then briefly returned to the US,
where he taught economics to young students at the prestigious Harvard
University and served as a link between Gordon Brown and then-presidential
candidate John Kerry (now the US Secretary of State). In 2005, he stood in
Doncaster North, taking on the challenge of being the
local MP for a rural part of Yorkshire, hard-hit by the decline of the coal
industry. A year later, he joined the Cabinet Office, coordinating policy
across the government and working
to strengthen the charitable sector. Rising to become Labour’s chief
manifesto writer before the 2010 election, it was Ed who fought hard to
include common-sense policies like the Living
Wage in Labour’s offer to the country last time around, laying the
groundwork for what he would go on to do as leader.
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| Ed Miliband at conference, 2012 (from Flickr) |
Even I am not completely blind to the common
charge that Ed is ‘weird’ in some ways – photogenic pictures of him can be hard
to come by and reportedly, he can solve a Rubik’s
cube in 90 seconds. But in an age when few of our political leaders are
truly normal, Ed still checks all the essential boxes. Remarkably, he is
somehow the only current party leader who knows what it was like to attend a state
comprehensive, bringing him closer to the life experiences of 93% of
the people he represents than any one of his rivals. At the heart of government
and amid massive corruption, he proved himself to be one of few honest men,
positioning him well to fix our broken political system. He has immense
intelligence and experience crafting economic policy, including the ones that
saw us through the boom years before the global financial crash of 2008. And he
has a long record of devoted public service. We can ask for little more from a
potential prime minister.
So there you go, spread the word. Ed Miliband is the
man we need leading us right now.
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