Jan 12th 2012, 20:14 by Bagehot
MY column in this week's newspaper is about the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, and why things are looking bleak for him. Here it is:
ED MILIBAND, leader of the opposition Labour Party, has a problem which should not be serious, but probably is. In this buffed and burnished television age, he sounds and looks a bit odd. This makes him increasingly the butt of jokes. Things are so bad that a BBC interviewer this week asked him—more or less directly—whether he was too ugly to be prime minister.
There is not much that Mr Miliband can do about his slightly prissy delivery and doleful, irregular features. In contrast another, genuinely grave, flaw is entirely his own fault. Mr Miliband’s plans for solving Britain’s most pressing problems manage to be both too timid and implausibly ambitious.
On January 10th Mr Miliband gave a speech on the economy, explaining what his party should stand for, now there is less money around. Amid horrible approval ratings (according to YouGov, a pollster, some two-thirds of voters think the Labour leader is doing a bad job) allies of Mr Miliband talked up the importance of the address. They called it a moment to “bash on the head” the idea that Labour is in denial about the need to fix the public finances.
Mr Miliband made an important concession in his speech: that Britain will probably be stuck in austerity after the next general election, planned for 2015. That means a future Labour government would not be able to reverse every spending cut made by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, he said. His Labour Party would not be able to repeat Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s strategy of letting financially turbocharged growth rip, while diverting some of the proceeds into public works and welfare. Labour would have to deliver “fairness in tough times”.
Mr Miliband and his inner circle are convinced this message resonates with the “squeezed middle”: the group that has seen its living standards stagnate while welfare recipients at the bottom of society and bankers at the top seem to have been spared pain. The Labour leader believes that he predicted the current national mood of gloom and anger. He devoted chunks of his speech to explaining just how prescient he has been.
He had been mocked when he first attacked “crony capitalism”, he declared. Now Tories and Lib Dems were scrambling to copy him. A year and a half ago, Labour warned the government about the dangers of cutting spending too far and too fast. It had been proved right, he insisted. Because too much demand has been removed from the economy, the government would have to borrow “£158 billion more” than planned over five years.
The Labour leader is fond of this last argument about missing demand, and repeats it often. But this is odd. For one thing, it is a source of public doubts about Labour’s commitment to reducing the budget deficit, a task most voters say is necessary. For another, it is a ludicrously complex line of attack. Economists disagree about the precise impact of deficit spending (and voters are just as confused, with poll numbers on whom or what to blame for Britain’s economic woes splitting every which way). Most damagingly, Mr Miliband is picking a fight about the past. He is seeking to prove, with numbers, that voters made a mistake when they trusted the coalition back in 2010. That is a strange use of an opposition leader’s time.
It is also not working. Polls show voters far more inclined to trust Mr Cameron than Mr Miliband on the economy, even if they are not sure the Tory leader is worried about fairness. Perhaps this is because, on taking office, the coalition made a much bigger and more easily understood prediction: that a terrifying economic storm was brewing, which would be made more lethal by Labour’s failure to put money aside in good times.
Mr Miliband claims to “relish” the chance to manage the economy differently. But when it comes to embracing austerity, he could hardly sound more grudging. In his speech he did not admit to a penny of wasted spending in 13 years of Labour rule. He offered a single example of spending he might trim, and vowed to offset that with compensation from the private sector. In office, he explained, Labour might not be able to increase the winter-fuel allowance (a universal benefit paid to elderly dukes as well as retired dustmen). To offset that pain, he would push energy companies to offer their cheapest fuel tariffs to the elderly.
The quiet man
What changes does Mr Miliband relish, then? The answer lies in his talk of breaking with New Labour’s economic model. Yes, he says, he is “incredibly proud” of schools and hospitals paid for with the proceeds of growth, and the jobs created under Mr Blair and Mr Brown. But too many of those jobs offered low-paid, low-skilled drudgery. Mr Miliband wants to use “the power of government” in new ways. He vows to harness regulations, tax rules and government procurement contracts to craft a kinder, more sustainable version of capitalism with a marked Rhineland tinge: think apprentices, employee representatives helping to set bosses’ pay, and a Britain in which smart graduates want to design clever machines, not City derivatives.
These are bold plans, at a time when governments worldwide are struggling to survive until next month. Mr Miliband is serenely confident. These are early days, he says. The government is failing. Voters will come round.
Voters’ trust in the government could crumble. But Mr Miliband may not have much time. Grumbling from Labour MPs is turning into on-the-record sniping. Timidity about how to cut spending is less of a problem than their leader’s vaulting ambitions to reshape British capitalism, just when voters have lost faith in the ability of experts of all sorts to improve anything. Mr Miliband is a mid-sized politician making outlandish claims. That credibility gap explains why voters are not listening.
In this blog, our Bagehot columnist surveys the politics of Britain, British life and Britain's place in the world. The column and blog are named after Walter Bagehot, an English journalist who was the editor of The Economist from 1861 to 1877
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Mr Miliband ... is seeking to prove ... that voters made a mistake when they trusted the coalition back in 2010. That is a strange use of an opposition leader’s time.
Not really... He is trying to say "you voters made a mistake in the last election; choose me the next time and I promise to do better". In my memory, this is what every opposition leader says in election campaigning.
Of course, the Tory and LibDem riposte will be "Labour overspent for 13 years, we inherited an indebted system", so the two arguments will cancel out and if you're lucky you'll be left with a straight debate on two different philosophies about turning the situation around.
The cynic in me is tempted to think that Labour does not want to win the next election, though; better to leave the coalition gov't to enact the strict austerity measures, wait for the US economy to pick up and hope for the Euro mess to settle down, and then Labour can hope to be voted back in on a wave of nostalgia for those good old days of economic boom and social spending.
E.
This mechanical engineer is getting a rather irritated by toffee nosed Oxford PPE graduates who have never worked outside the political machine saying that we should make more things.
@ spartan33
Terms of trade, I'm afraid, and mostly thanks to the politicians themselves. They are happy to have internal debates about how to reform the welfare state, the tax system, what the FCO stance to, for example, Saudi Arabia should be, but the public sees and hears very little of this, which is a shame because the result is that debate has been infantilised. Instead, Mr Cameron says that Mr Balls has something of the Tourette's patient about him and is in his turn derided as a toff - Flashman, the school bully. I mean, honestly, it's enough to make a cat laugh. But if they want to act that way, why should we not throw rocks at them too, and what else do they expect? As to doing their jobs honestly, the majority do, but some plainly do not. That is more worrying.
Attacking a politician (or any person for that matter) because of his/her looks is totally preposterous.
We don't ask politicians to be good looking but to do their job honestly.
Also could you please let me know what state leader currently can claim to be good-looking?
Merkel - 'Unfu**able lard a**' as Silvio explained in a rare moment of lucidity
Obama - Dumbo
Sarkozy - ugly like a rat
Cameron - chubby child
What has not been much remarked on is Mr Miliband's assertion that Labour would have to deliver "fairness in tough times". This suggests that he sees the state as the single moral arbiter: there is little left to nationalise, so he wants to nationalise doing the right thing. If asked whether they wanted to live in county where a panel a super-annuated worthies decided who is in need, most people, I feel, would answer in the negative. He is stuck in statism - Britain as a 1970s polytechnic social work course in which he is leading the role play sessions.
The curious thing, however, is for that all his presentational failings and obvious unattractiveness to the wider electorate (as well as to his parliamentary colleagues) Mr Miliband is to some extent making the weather, especially about the squeezed middle and morally bankrupt high finance. He would be taken far more seriously if only he could up with some sort of ritual abasement, even if lispingly, blinking and still adenoidal, for Labour past demented profligacy.
Who shall lead them after he has gone? I agree that Ms Cooper is the best currently available, though she would suffer from guilt by association with her husband. David Miliband would be damned for having let his little brother do him in. Rachel Reeves is bright but a droner - sounds like a flock of geese coming in to land at feeding time. Chuka Umunna is interesting, clean about the neck, but one does not yet see the Blair-like determination to drag the party back towards reality and the centre. This, remember, is a political organisation that only a few months ago booed its greatest ever electoral asset. Whoever leads after Mr Miliband will have a really horrible job to do.
I don't think its fair to say that drawing attention to being right about something in the past can be dismissed as living in the past. The extension of that is that to assume that it is ineffective or wrong to point out that someone has ever made a mistake or that you accurately predicted something. That seems a little forgiving to someone being on the wrong side of an arguement.
Its also a little silly to actually claim that 'it' is isn't working. Regardless of who voters say about they trust on 'the economy', if Labour's polled vote share continues to exceed the Conservatives (As it has almost unbroken for a long time) I'm a little curious as to what anyone thinks would be causing that. Something is clearly working.
I am (still) sure that Ed Milli is merely a placeholder for Labour during their time in the wilderness following the Blair/Brown era, designed to lose valiantly at the next election before his far more talented and electable (and less ugly) elder brother, David Milli, takes over.
David isn't that much better, slightly, tiny bit less left. Behind David... Cooper? Then pretty much no one. It's not just the leader, Labours cabinet and up and coming rank and file is aweful too. The party isn't ready for 2015.
Agreed
What is so great about David Milliband? Is being seen as a Blair pet such a great asset?
Labour needs to move beyond Blair/Brown, Old/New Labour. You could find few so badly tainted by 13 years of government than David Milliband.