Blair, Lawson & Rawnsley are all wrong - Ed Miliband is holding the centre ground

On December 30^th, an Economist interview with Tony Blair made waves, after the former Prime Minister appeared to predict this May’s general election will be one “in which a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party – with the traditional result” (asked directly if this meant an 80s-style Tory win, he clarified “Yes, that is what happens”). Blair further said he had “seen no evidence” that Britain had become more left-wing in recent years and added that he is “still very much New Labour, and Ed would not describe himself in that way, so there is obviously a difference there”, arguing that his successor once-removed needs to seize the all-important “centre ground” of politics.

In turn, two pieces have been written in the Guardian. The first was a letter to Mr Blair by left-wing Compass director Neal Lawson, seeking to take him to task for failing to make the country more left-wing. In his piece, Lawson manages to wrongly dismiss the vital work Blair did to reform Labour and make the party capable of governing uninterrupted for 13 years. Lawson also claims that “all [Blair] did was to focus-group middle England and give a few swing voters more of what they already had”, flippantly ignoring the economic growth, redistributive interventions and vital improvements in public services that Blair’s progressive leadership brought. He makes clear that he assumes that a 1997 John Smith victory on a 1992-style platform was inevitable, a common bit of revisionism that somewhat overlooks the scepticism of Brown and Blair about Smith’s “one more heave” strategy, and certainly ignores the question of what might have happened in subsequent elections. And perhaps worst of all is this quote: “But in hindsight the wrong people were voting Labour. The tent was too big and you spent the next 10 years trying to keep the wrong people in it”. As Chris Terry of the Electoral Reform Society succinctly put it on Twitter, “Imagine if a Tory said 'the wrong people are voting for the Conservative Party’”.

The second piece, by Observer chief political commentator Andrew Rawnsley, directly criticises Lawson’s narrow view of who should be in Labour’s coalition, and goes on to posit that both Ed Miliband and David Cameron’s current electoral challenges stem from their failure to emulate Blair and take the centre ground (though Rawnsley does criticise Blair’s conduct in Iraq and his post-premiership activities). Rawnsley repeats the view expressed by Blair to the Economist that the difference between Miliband and Blair is that Miliband thinks the 2008 financial crisis shifted the centre ground to the left, while Blair feels it has either stayed static or moved right. This distinction has been stressed by Miliband critics for much of the past four years. Perhaps more original is Rawnsley’s criticism of Cameron on a similar score – Rawnsley wryly observes that while Cameron once called himself “the heir to Blair”, it now seems that “the Tories assume that the country has shifted to the right and that it is now an election-winning proposition to promise unfunded tax cuts for the affluent and a squeeze on public provision so severe that even the most rightwing of their Lib Dem coalition partners are condemning it as ideologically driven savagery”.

However, the core of Rawnsley’s piece seems to be backing Blair’s take on Miliband. And as much as I disagree with Lawson’s dismissiveness of Blair’s considerable achievements and agree with Rawnsley’s rebuttal, I also object to the Blair-Rawnsley characterisation of both Ed’s positioning and the current “centre ground”. The truth is, “Milibandite” One Nation Labourism is neither as narrow as Blair/Rawnsley fear or as Lawson hopes. Here’s why.

1)     Has Ed really abandoned New Labour’s ideals outright?

First, let’s take a paragraph of Rawnsley’s piece and I’ll start to show you what I mean:

“What’s done more damage to Labour’s cause is that too many of its own people have also treated their longest period in power as an aberration. Ed Miliband has given the impression that he regards everything about New Labour as an embarrassment and Mr Blair as the black sheep of the family that no one speaks about. Mr Miliband was bound to put distance between himself and some of the unpopular legacies, but suggesting that he thinks the entire period was one epic mistake has prevented him from taking ownership of New Labour’s achievements and what was admired about them”

For comparison, here’s some excerpts from Ed’s first conference speech in 2010, in which he explains his own take on New Labour (a project he had been a part of since 1994).

“We began as restless and radical. Remember the spirit of 1997, but by the end of our time in office we had lost our way. The most important lesson of New Labour is this: Every time we made progress we did it by challenging the conventional wisdom. Think of how we took on the idea that there was a public ownership solution to every problem our society faced. We changed Clause 4. We were right to do so. Think of how we emphasised being tough on crime was as important as being tough on the causes of crime. We were right to do so. Think of how we challenged the impression that we taxed for its own sake and that we were hostile to business. We were right to change…And the reason Tony and Gordon took on conventional wisdom in our party was so they could change the country. We forget too easily what a radical challenge their ideas were to established ways of thinking about Britain and how they reshaped the centre-ground of politics. They were reforming, restless and radical… But our journey must also understand where it went wrong. I tell you, I believe that Britain is fairer and stronger than it was 13 years ago. But we have to ask, how did a party with such a record lose five million votes between 1997 and 2010? It didn't happen by accident. The hard truth for all of us in this hall is that a party that started out taking on old thinking became the prisoner of its own certainties. 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”

In other words, only by ignoring what Ed actually says can you get “the impression he regards everything about New Labour” – again, a project he was a longtime contributor to – “as an embarrassment”. Ed does indeed call out New Labour for some of its most questionable aspects as Rawnsley suggests (namely immigration, financial regulation and - elsewhere in the speech - Iraq). But at the outset of his leadership, he also very clearly expressed his admiration for New Labour’s radicalism, tough-but-fair stance on crime, rebuttal of unthinking tax-and-spend statism and support for entrepreneurialism.

And for the past four years, I believe the direction of policy development in Ed Miliband’s Labour Party has been largely consistent with this. Yvette Cooper is still praised for being tough on crime. Liam Byrne and Rachel Reeves have been similarly moderate on welfare, backing a cap on social security spending and preaching Frank Field-style “something-for-something” contributory welfare (meanwhile, Blair rejected Field’s ideas as “unfathomable” when Field was his junior welfare minister). Chuka Umunna is aggressively courting private sector support with events like Small Business Saturday, and Labour is backing a business rate cut and banking reforms that will help struggling small businesses. In his Hugo Young lecture on public service reform last February, Ed condemned “old-style, top-down central control, with users as passive recipients of services”, while in 2013, he pushed through bold reforms of Labour’s relationship with the unions that Blair himself admitted were more than he had ever achieved. And all the while, Ed Balls and Chris Leslie are pledging tough spending restraint in order to eliminate the deficit, to the point that the Neal Lawsons on Labour’s left frequently moan that the party needs a “bolder offer” (read: “should attempt to wow people with irresponsible, uncosted spending commitments”).

Essentially, Ed has done precisely what he said he would. He has jettisoned some of the controversial or failed aspects of New Labour, while sticking with (or going beyond) many of the successful, centre-seizing elements of Blair’s formula. The policy offer Ed is attempting to lay out is consistent with Rawnsley’s simple summation of what was so good about New Labour (“The appeal and the animating idea of Blairism was that voters look for a government that they can trust with both the economy and with public services, which is both fair to the underprivileged and a friend of aspiration”). And while Blair’s somewhat pedantic observation that Ed wouldn’t describe himself as “New Labour” anymore is undoubtedly correct, it’s too often forgotten that even Blair’s protégé David Miliband started his 2010 leadership campaign by declaring that “This is a new era…New Labour's not new anymore. New Labour did fantastic things for the country, but what counts is Next Labour." In the ways that still count, Ed remains resolutely New Labour in spirit.

2)     Where and what is the “centre ground”?

Furthermore, there’s another issue that always dogs these debates about who is in the “centre ground” of politics. Rawnsley’s claim that David Cameron is vacating the centre is punctuated with two clear examples of policy (unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy & the promise of 1930s-scale austerity), but tellingly, he doesn’t actually mention which of Ed’s “left-wing” polices signal the Labour leader’s abandonment of the centre ground. The classical liberal-leaning Economist is willing to be more specific, to be fair, claiming Miliband’s supposed drift to unelectability stems from the fact he has “trodden a populist, proto-socialist path, attacking alleged examples of “predatory capitalism” such as soaring energy bills and the property rental market” (Peter Mandelson and other arch-Blairites have similarly criticised Ed for these “anti-business” policies).

But herein lies the problem – while it remains important for Labour to generally be pro-business (and especially pro-small business), reforming the utilities, rental and transport markets in the way Miliband seeks to do is not actually unpopular according to opinion polls (ditto for the 50p and mansion taxes). Indeed, his proposed interventions are often moderate compared to what the public would be willing to countenance (wisely, Ed is not pledging outright nationalisation of utilities or railways – nor should he - but the polls I’ve linked above suggest the public might back him anyway if he did). You can still attempt to make the case that Miliband’s actual moderate-left policies on these issues are nevertheless bad policy if you so wish, of course. But you can’t claim that they are unpopular, or that he has “vacated the centre” by pledging them.

This flows into a broader point. Most voters will indeed always describe themselves as “centrists”, but it’s unlikely they define the term in the same relatively uniform fashion that politicians and the commentariat tend to. While on certain issues they huddle in the mid-point between traditional left/Labour and right/Conservative stances, on others they more clearly align with one party and, on certain issues, public opinion is actually far further to the left/right than either mainstream party is willing to go. Westminster commentators also tend to define the “centre” roughly in terms of liberalism – politicians must neither be too socially backward (the Conservatives’ main perceived problem) nor too economically interventionist (Labour’s). Many British voters, by contrast, might define their own “centre” much more illiberally, if polls are to be believed. A great many Labour voters hold views to the right even of Blair on crime and immigration, for example, while majorities of Conservative voters claim they would be okay with the wholesale renationalisation of the railways and energy companies.

This is where Ed’s embrace of some aspects of Lord Glasman’s Blue Labour is critical, as when fused with many of the enduring elements of Blair’s contribution to the party, his recalibrated “Blue & New” One Nation Labour platform is better able to speak to 2015 Britain’s natural centre than unmodified Blairism now can. It allows Ed to boldly promise market reforms of the kind that Mandleson and the Economist warned against, knowing that they speak to voters’ anxieties about cost of living and their feeling that institutional forces seem stacked against them. But it also allows him to flexibly shrug off Blair’s “warm beer and old maids bicycling” jibes in order to take a harder line on immigration and a less federal one on the EU, knowing that he must address anger over these aspects of Blair’s record if he is to respond to public concern on these salient issues and prevent UKIP from dividing Labour’s fragile electoral coalition.

So let’s go back to the 2010 conference speech again, shall we? “New Labour, a political force founded on its ability to adapt and change, lost its ability to do so”. Damn right, Ed - ignore your critics and keep on course.