Ed Miliband has been in danger of coming under siege from his own parliamentary colleagues. A growing clamour for a call to arms against the coalition and a spurious demand for his leadership and Labour’s policy on the cuts to be forensically defined, mask an underlying dissatisfaction that he, with his particular vision for the party’s future, is leader at all. In the interest of political sanity and salvation the sullenness must end. An insolent revolution by members of the Shadow Cabinet, MPs and the commentariat will amount to little more than a kamikaze attack against the Labour Party itself and the people it will one day represent in government if Mr Miliband has his way.
He has been criticised, even as he was barely out of paternity leave, for causing “drift” by being too quiet on policy announcements, a little too reticent on startling party reforms, such as kicking the unions into a leper colony, for having no “Clause IV moment” up his sleeve. In short, for not having the Mandelsonian wit to concoct a confrontation with his own party to serve up like bull’s testicles as a sign of his leadership credentials; the metaphorical bull in this case being Len McCluskey and his trade union colleagues.
Mr Miliband has no time for such dishonest constructs. He did not fight the leadership election, as others might have, to make tearing his own party apart the defining quality of that leadership. Mr Miliband recognised as he prepared for his keynote speech to the party’s National Policy Forum – which has been allowed to carry dangerously high expectations – that if he was to have a “moment” at all it had to be a different one from Tony Blair’s scrapping of the totemic symbol of the commitment to establishing the “common ownership of the means of production”. This must be his “No Turning Back” moment, a replay of Margaret Thatcher’s message to her party that the past is past and that the shape of the future is about to be drawn.
Mr Miliband does, as Tribune has been doggedly urging, have to be clearer about the recklessness of the Government’s economic path by being more vocal in his own belief that this scale and speed of cuts is ideologically driven and that it threatens to bury, not rescue, the economy. He knows that it is the role of every radical, progressive leader to shape that future against the reactionary forces which the law of politics determines will always fill a vacuum bound by the past. He gets it. It is about time some of his colleagues got it, too.
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The real Irish economy remains in relatively good shape, though the chaos heaped on it by the gross venality of the financial sector gives an understandably different impression.
Once again, the greed of the fat cats has led to punitive cuts and, moreover, in Ireland’s case, a potentially epoch changing political crisis and a contagious effect throughout Europe. It has also exposed the lies of Chancellor George Osborne, who is willing to stimulate the Irish economy but not that of the United Kingdom.
