It is not a fracturing of the party’s links with the unions. The wary but collegiate mood of the TUC Congress in London underlined, if not underpinned, the determination of both the unions and the Labour leadership to maintain the party link. Ed Miliband’s “anti-union” speech was a Labour leader’s traditional default rubbishing of his party’s founders and funders delivered over the heads of his hosts to an audience viscerally suspicious and hostile to the influence and existence of trade unions and ignorant of the benefits they bring to a civilised society.
The conflict between the unions and the party leadership is, as ever, over the industrial wing’s right to influence over policy, talks about which will go on behind the scenes up to Mr Miliband’s keynote address to the Labour conference at the end of this month.
It is in this speech that Mr Miliband holds the future of his party and British politics in his hand. His task is manifold. He has to show that he has finally thrown off the dead weight of the “uber-Blairites” who have been trying to use him as a mere cipher for their longer term obsession with discredited purpose and policies. He has to re-inspire those on the left who long-ago abandoned any hope that the Labour Party would regain its progressive identity, as well as those who have been disappointed by his leadership in the last year.
Moreover, he has to embrace and show leadership for the wider number of progressives in Britain for whom the Tories and their creation of greater inequality and increased poverty are anathema to the sort of society they want to see in this country. As Kevin Maguire argues on page six, there are many policies out there which should be proudly Labour’s but are currently advocated by another party, the Liberal Democrats. Mr Miliband, as we report on this page, wants to appeal to both the members and supporters of Nick Clegg’s party to create a broad force against reactionary conservatism. There will be many at the Lib Dem conference in Birmingham wondering what their party is doing in this coalition, which kicks into the long grass partial – yes, in spite of the wailing from the City – banking reforms and offers, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the prospect of a 10 per cent drop in poorer families’ living standards.
The Tories did not win the last election and David Cameron, on the back of a populist and opportunistic reaction to the parliamentary expenses scandal, is determined to shift the balance in his favour next time by fixing the boundaries for Westminster seats.
It is Mr Miliband’s job to stop him. He has every opportunity on his side bar one, that is his own leadership style. As Ian Aitken puts it starkly, again on page six: Please say something. If not, it’s goodbye to all that.
