Did you get it? If you had to rely on the judgement of the commentariat the chances are that you wouldn’t. Ed Miliband’s speech to Labour conference has provoked reactions ranging from incomprehensible to revolutionary. “A leaden speech that had little to do with reality,” according to the Daily Telegraph. A leader in The Times pretty much agreed. For most of the right-wing press, it was a dangerous lurch to the left. Among the few qualified supporters, it was long on rhetoric and short on detail. And then there was the almost universally held view, expressed by those critics who will never be persuaded by anything less than the Sermon on the Mount if it comes from Labour lips, that Ed is a man whose lack of personality means that he is just not up to the job.
But it was not just the view of die-hard Labour opponents. Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian wrote a piece beneath a headline which read: “We know that personality matters, and Ed just doesn’t have the X-factor”. He said: “He is a decent, clever man but he does not look the part.” And: “Brown taught us that policy nuances count for little if the public don’t warm to you. This may be Miliband’s fate, too.”
Then there were those who did get it, and they popped up in some surprising places. In short, it was a remarkable refounding of Labour, disappointing in its economic caution and orthodoxy, but a clear-water departure from the discredited values of New Labour and an outline of a new social morality, an end to “fast-buck” Britain.
To one contributor to the Daily Telegraph’s letters page that was more than alarming: “What a vision of horror Ed Miliband holds out.”
The same paper’s leading political columnist, Benedict Brogan, under a headline reading: “Ed Miliband’s shift to the left is a gift to the Tories”, wrote: “The Labour leader won’t win any voters by tearing up everything he believed in.
“Mr Miliband has persuaded himself that public uncertainty about the economy, accelerated by anger about the bankers, journalists and politicians, shows that the system itself is bust.”
Exactly a week later, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a programme devoted to a serious debate on whether capitalism, now dependent on a debased, artificial world of virtual commodities rather than actual goods, has indeed collapsed as a credible economic system. Ed may well be articulating what voters are thinking. Across the political spectrum – well half way across – The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee was positively enthused. He may never win an Oscar for performance, but his speech marked out a new radicalism and honesty for Labour, she said. Here was a reasoned argument on the side of the many who find things too often rigged against them by vested interests and cartels.
“Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown would ever have spoken great chunks of this speech, as year after year they dared to voice no indignation at the wilder dysfunctions of an out-of-control culture of obscene rewards. He broke the spell and said what people think. His critics may yet eat their words.”
Her paper’s letters page was divided. “Ed Miliband is bringing a long overdue approach to political debate and the role of Leader of the Opposition”, wrote Irene Short from Halton in Buckinghamshire. “Let us hope he can resist the pull to descend to the destructive exchanges which have dominated and distorted political development for far too long.”
Whereas as DBC Reed from Northampton wished to highlight the speech’s shortcomings: “[His] message at Liverpool was vitiated by his financial and fiscal orthodoxy. Unless he breaks out and recognises the right of the state to create money, for instance by using quantitative easing to finance public services rather than commercial banks’ speculation activities, he will just make the Labour Party like the rest, giving private banks control of the public money supply, ending up with the state, as usual, paying to borrow money which it could easily create itself.”
For Jenni Russell, not given to over-favourable comments on Labour, Miliband is taking over political territory that only a couple of years ago David Cameron was claiming as his own. Writing in the London Evening Standard she said: “Ed Miliband’s call for a fairer and more responsible society poses a real threat to
the Conservatives. His conference speech didn’t argue those ideas clearly but the themes are powerful and he has time to develop them. Miliband’s argument is potentially compelling because it’s true. The Tory reaction has been
to deride Miliband as naive and
his ideas as insubstantial. That
won’t stick if his policies are developed and the more thoughtful Tories know it.”
One such is columnist Peter Oborne. Writing heretically in the Daily Telegraph under the headline: “Like it or not, Ed Miliband has redefined the future of politics”, he said: “The obsessive concentration on matters of overwhelming triviality has obscured the central point: that Miliband made an intellectually ambitious and admirable contribution to public debate. He sought to reshape the terms of political argument and so redefine the territory on which the general election will ultimately be fought. He has even made a tentative step towards tearing up the rules that have defined British economics for the past with his cautious critique of capitalism as it has been carried on here for the past 30 years. This was long overdue.”
So what about that triviality, Ed’s “weirdness”? Londoner David Butler asks Guardian readers: “ Is Ed too weird to be Prime Minister?” We have had weird PMs before. Clem was weirdly self-effacing. John Major dated Edwina Currie – how weird is that? And Heath – organ-playing yachtsman – wrote the book on weird. Opposition leaders have also been branded as predestined losers. Thatcher was written off – a woman. Blair was written off – Bambi. Cameron was written off – insubstantial.
“Between now and 2015, as Britain’s economy and the NHS disappear down the Cameron-Clegg gurgler, weird may be OK.” Indeed, the voters might just get it.
