Quality | 2010.08.19
David Miliband does not offer the change Labour needs | Jon Trickett
The party must admit where it went wrong and reclaim the centre left to win again. David Miliband is too New Labour to do this
Some senior Labour MPs believe all we need to do to win again is elect a young-looking prime minister in-waiting and combine him or her with "New" Labour politics. They are completely wrong.
Instead, we need a fresh and bold alternative to the Tories. As Peter Hain explained , the rightwing grip on the coalition government will undermine it. Tens of thousands who turned to the Lib Dems now feel lost, betrayed by their party\'s decision to support spending cuts that will hurt the poor and vulnerable.
The centre left is now vacant, waiting for the Labour party to reconquer its natural terrain. But we first have to explain why we lost our direction in order to understand how we can win.
The seeds of our defeat were germinating before 2005. I do not make this claim purely with the advantage of hindsight. I was the campaign manager for Jon Cruddas \'s attempt to become deputy leader in 2007. We ran the "Choose Change" movement. We argued that the 2005 election – far from being a triumph – signalled danger for Labour if the lessons of the Tony Blair era were not learned.
Under Blair\'s leadership, Labour lost 4 million voters. By 2005, "New" Labour\'s electoral alliance was crumbling. In the race between continuity and change, we argued then, the party must "choose change" or face defeat.
But in order to change, we must be unflinching in our analysis. We should acknowledge that our espousal of the triumph of the market failed to deliver public goods and that increasing inequality was allowed to damage our social fabric. The decision on Iraq was a gross error.
The key organising concept of New Labour was that of aspiration. Rightly so: everyone hopes for a better future. But too often our policy was at variance with our traditional values. We forgot our own clause IV, that "by our common endeavour we can achieve more than we do alone".
There were arguments against a modest tax rise for the very wealthy because it might be seen as a " cap on aspiration ". But we forgot that nine out of 10 lived on less than £44,000 a year. We couldn\'t imagine that people might "aspire" to live in the rented sector, especially in a council house. Yet millions of our supporters did just that. In my area of Wakefield, the number of people waiting to be allocated a council property rose to 24,000. Equally, we decided to expand the number of university places to meet the aspirations of the upwardly mobile, but introduced up front tuition fees that led to genuine fears of massive student debt.
By 2005, many of our own supporters refused to vote for us. But the Tories had not yet recovered. We won in part by default, faced as we were by an ineffective opposition. We then failed to sufficiently re-orient the government in the face of a resurgent opposition and we went down to defeat.
However, today, it is these New Labour traditionalists that don\'t want to debate the whole of our period in office under Brown and Blair. Their analysis goes little deeper than the view that the last couple of years of the Labour government were difficult. They hanker for a leader who will take them back to the glory days.
They see the candidature of David Miliband, whose political CV is entrenched in the New Labour project as head of Tony Blair\'s policy unit, as their best hope. But the Choose Change movement recalls the resistance of the policy unit to commonsense, centre-left policies such as building council houses, regulating buses and giving agency workers better protection.
Ed Miliband, on the other hand, has published a detailed analysis indicating that he understands the problems facing Labour. He has reminded us that millions of middle- and lower-income voters became detached from the government in the New Labour years. He has argued that we need to " change to win ".
That is why, in what now looks like a two-horse race, so many Choose Change supporters will now give our support to Ed Miliband. His understanding and analysis of the depth of the challenges facing Labour means he is best placed among the candidates for leader to articulate the case for renewal and change.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]rship-david-miliband-no-change
