Member News
By Alex Bryce - 30th September 2010
I was wrong about David, Ed and Alan.
A few months ago I wrote an article published on this website pouring scorn on the Labour leadership contest.
It irritated many of my Labour colleagues including, I'm told, a few of the contenders themselves.
After what seemed like an eternity of hustings and debates that generated no new ideas and sucked the hope and life out of many Labour activists, we now have our new leader.
When the result was announced on Saturday I was dismayed – a little like the feeling I had when Leon Jackson won the X-Factor - and I genuinely feared for the short-term future of the party.
Ed Miliband had been my fourth preference, behind Diane Abbott and only just ahead of Andy Burnham.
It's not that I particularly disliked Ed – I just felt that he had spent much of his campaign superficially pandering to the left and I believed that his brother David was more electable.
I was wrong.
The conduct of David Miliband since the result was announced – as well as that of the cabal of former cabinet ministers who supported him - has demonstrated how crucial a break from the New Labour brand is for the party.
By audaciously challenging his elder brother for the big job, Ed has demonstrated that he has the one thing David's own supporters always feared the elder brother lacked: the courage to act on his convictions.
A ridiculous media circus was generated by David's delay in announcing his decision to stand down from frontline politics.
One of those David supporters, Alan Johnson, gave a conference speech that was an ode to the virtues of the senseless authoritarian populism on which New Labour was founded.
It felt like a flashback to a bygone era.
It is probably for the best that I wasn't in the conference hall to see it or I would have had to resist the urge to mount the stage, shake him from his trance and remind him that fifteen years have passed and the party has left behind its unelectable image.
Perhaps I would have faced the same fate as Walter Wolfgang who, at the age of 88, was evicted from conference in 2005 and subsequently detained by the police under anti-terror laws for simply shouting 'nonsense' at Jack Straw.
I still have a few reservations about Ed Miliband as Labour leader and a potential prime minister.
His conference speech was all about positioning and was a typical 'tick-box speech', one that to say something to please certain sections of the audience (such as his Iraq comments) and other things to refute certain criticisms or challenge particular negative perceptions (such as his pledge not to support irresponsible strikes).
He did tick many of the right boxes and appropriately distanced himself from some of the more illiberal and populist aspects of the previous Labour government.
He also made it clear that he won't undermine any economic credibility we have left by opposing every coalition cut for the sake of it.
Despite these positives I wouldn't class it as an inspirational speech, but a decent first effort.
That being said, he did offer perhaps the most pertinent and accurate critique of New Labour that I have heard: that they were obsessed with occupying the centre ground, wherever that happened to be, and thus were defined by it.
His vision is a hopeful one of a centrist party that seeks to define the political centre ground rather than merely ascertaining where it is then pitching a tent.
This is no small task for any new leader, but if Ed manages to significantly drive or even influence public opinion then, though he might never become prime minister, he will still have achieved something that I doubt New Labour ever managed - or even tried - to do.
The death of New Labour doesn't have to signal a disastrous lurch to the left but rather an end to the authoritarian populism and the senseless and ultimately counter-productive pandering to the Daily Mail on which New Labour was founded.
The political centre ground has inevitably moved in the last fifteen years and those senior Labour figures who are still paralysed by the paranoia of being presented as unelectable seem to have forgotten that we won three successive elections and lost the fourth not because we were too radical or too idealistic but because we ran out of steam and ideas.
Ed Miliband has realised this and I am hopeful that his victory over his elder brother who is still wedded to the New Labour project will bring about a new dawn for the party.
Alex Bryce is a researcher for a Labour MP.
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