The Tory Party’s answer to Elsie Tanner, Sayeeda Warsi, has published a dossier catchingly entitled 52 Weeks of Weakness. Oh dear. So that’s what arguably the most spectacularly ineffective party chair in the history of anything has been doing all this time. This document, which hardly anyone outside (and probably inside) Conservative Central Office, can actually have read, is little short of a character assassination of Ed Miliband.
But I’m glad she bothered. It shows that, a year after his election to the Labour leadership, the Tories is waking up to the fact that – maybe, just maybe – the party under Ed Miliband is slowly emerging from a year-long diapause and should be taken seriously. This assumption evidenced by the fact that Baroness Warsi has been reading Tribune. Indeed, she quotes from this august organ. That the first page of entries in her dossier concentrates exclusively on Ed Miliband’s union links, demonstrates that the Tories are still unable to pin down their enemy. Instead they resort to inane attacks on his supposed inability to curb union power over the Labour conference, dependence on union cash and failure to veto the unions’ choice of party general secretary.
By the end of her dossier, Warsi is reduced to repeating the same mantra over and over again. While Tory groundhogs gather in Manchester under the banner “Leadership for a Better Future” – which is less of a slogan and more of an aspiration – the Labour leader can build on an impressive week in Liverpool, during which he finally told the country who he is and what he is about. The relief was palpable, not just for delegates, but for Labour activists and supporters throughout the country.
“I am not Tony Blair”, said Ed Miliband in his speech to conference. Even he looked momentarily startled by the rapture with which this unnecessary declaration was greeted. At least it was unnecessary to anyone who heard him deliver his lines. But the fact remains that, with one or two notable Shadow Cabinet exceptions, no one inside the party wishes to see a return to unfettered free markets presided over by unfettered money-grabbing politicians. And yet that is precisely where the Tory-led coalition has taken us.
Far from being too far-left to win the next general election, Ed Miliband still has plenty of room to manoeuvre without alienating the middle classes. Only the seriously wealthy are likely to complain about a progressive tax system which demands “predatory” that corporations pay their due, or a pay structure that narrows the gap between chief executives and the shop floor.
When Peter Mandelson stated that New Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”, he encapsulated what many thought was the final nail in the coffin of old Labour. Tony Blair led by example and still does. Ed Miliband has made it clear that he is anything but relaxed about the new breed of feral rich. In doing so, he has disavowed the legacy Blair inherited from Thatcher. At the same time, he has signalled a change in emphasis – indeed support for a change in the balance of power, tipping the scales away from an untouchable super-rich in favour of everyone else. Attacking Sir Fred Goodwin was a sure-fire conference winner, but Miliband’s outrage signalled a long over-due realignment that will surely resonate widely.
Whether you look at the financial crash of 2008 which led to partial nationalising of the banking industry (and a whopping increase in the national deficit), the phone hacking scandal or the August riots they all have something thing in common: greed, and a complete disregard for what most of us would consider acceptable behaviour. Ed Miliband’s speech positioned himself firmly on the side of “most of us”. That’s not a bad position to be in.
Thatcher famously declared “there is no such thing as society” – a devastating comment that will surely be remembered long after David Cameron’s vagaries about the “Big Society”. Thank goodness, then, that – unlike Thatcher, Cameron and George Osborne – Ed Miliband believes in “the state”. As the coalition’s cuts bite, and the Tory-led Government’s deficit reduction plan fails to dent the scale of the debt, the numbers of those who agree with him can only increase.
We are not “all in this together”.
Even the Tory originators of this vomit-inducing phrase know this, which is why (I have been told) leading Tories have been banned from using it in Manchester this week.
Yes, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made mistakes. Only a fool – and there are still one or two on Labour’s front bench – would deny that. But last week was the time for our mea culpa. Now let’s stop apologising, follow our leader and remind voters that Labour’s real legacy is the welfare state, the National Health Service and the national minimum wage, and only Labour will fight to the end to protect all this.
