Ed Miliband: bankers, benefits claimaints, and Blair

Ed Miliband goes back to the future with New Labour

For a man who’s promised to move on from the past and lead a new political generation, Ed Miliband’s speech on “responsibility” today has a distinctly Blairite feel to it.

With his right hand, his takes a swipe at irresponsible benefits cheats. With his left, he jabs at irresponsible bankers. Both groups, he implies, are sucking up the taxes paid by hard-working, law-abiding folk in the middle.

The line about benefits cheats comes straight from the Blairite analysis of Labour’s election loss. Our own John McTernan has expertly explained how toxic that association became, and the Conservatives have enthusiastically tried to encourage it by seeking “wedge” issues like the proposed benefits cap.

To be sure, Labour admitting the problem is only the first step to dealing with it; it remains unclear how far the party’s policy review will go towards advocating genuine welfare reform.

On the banker-bashing, it’s worth remembering that the Blair years were not all about being “intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich”. Mr Miliband himself offers a coded rejection of that claim, made by Peter Mandelson but not actually properly representative of Blairite politics. In fact, Mr Tony started winning because he managed to position himself as the man in the middle, on the side of middle-income voters who both aspired to wealth and despaired of those unwilling to work as hard as them.

That didn’t always mean selling himself as leader of the Millionaires’ Party. Sometimes, as in 2002, he even spoke of the need for “redistribution” and often complained about the “ridiculous” wages paid to footballers. It was only towards the end (and especially now he’s out of office) that TB came to be associated with the super-rich and so to lose touch with “hard-working families”. It’s also pretty clear that the financial crisis has changed (or at least hardened) attitudes towards City millionaires.

Again, the policy Mr Miliband attaches to his analysis is far from clear: we get only a promise to consider the merits of worker seats on remumeration committees and the like.

Still, at this stage of the electoral cycle, we can pay too much attention to Labour policy. What matters more today is the party’s ability to look and sound like it understands what people think about their country. Accepting that fact made David Cameron an effective leader of the opposition: by talking about chocolate oranges at shop tills and sexualised clothing for kids, he showed he understood that he got it. What — if anything — he proposed to do about those things was secondary to that.

I should note here that Ed M’s friends strongly deny any suggestion of Blairite “triangulation” or positioning in his speech today. Instead of doing anything as base and venal as trying to align himself with the majority of voters, Mr Miliband is apparently describing the outcomes of his deep thinking about modern Britain’s problems and the solutions he believes are required.

Now, I could cattily observe that’s just what Alastair Campbell et al used to say about New Labour being a political message built on foundations of new political thinking, but journalists debating politicians’ motives is a fairly arid pastime: we say they’re trying to win votes; they say they’re trying to do the right thing for the country; let’s call the whole thing off. (I could also wonder why they’re in such a hurry to deny using the tactics that helped Mr Blair win three general elections, but that’s a debate for the Red Lion, not this blog.)

Anyway, motives rather less important than the fact that Ed Miliband is – today at least – in some danger of saying something that a lot of people could actually agree with. All he has to do now is get them to listen.