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Ed
Miliband, pictured, said he had lost the election, but not the argument in his
resignation speech. He was the most left-wing leader of the Labour Party since
Michael Foot absorbed by left-wing economics. Miliband, pictured, was convinced
that the British people wanted a more egalitarian society and socialism
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By Jason
Cowley For The Daily Mail
Ed Miliband’s defeat and resignation are a
personal humiliation and a family tragedy.
He
challenged his elder brother David for the leadership of the Labour Party in
2010, effectively destroying their relationship, because he was convinced it
was his destiny to become prime minister and to lead Britain in a bright new
direction.
In his
dignified resignation speech, Miliband said he’d lost the election but ‘not the
argument’.
This was
the statement of a deluded man. He lost the election and the argument. If
Labour doesn’t understand this, and adapt accordingly, it is in deeper trouble
than even I believed.
Driven by
a kind of messianic self-belief, Miliband was Labour’s most unashamedly
Left-wing leader since Michael Foot, whose 1983 election defeat condemned the
party to a long, painful period in the wilderness as Margaret Thatcher accelerated
her transformation of Britain.
On the
occasions when we met, he told me again and again that the financial crisis and
the consequent Great Recession had created what he called a moment of great
opportunity for the Left.
Absorbed
by the work of Left-wing economists and philosophers, Miliband was convinced
that the British people yearned for a more egalitarian society and a return to
socialism.
Perhaps
they did in Scotland, but certainly not in the seats in the Midlands, Home
Counties and southern England that Labour must win if it is ever to return to
power.
‘Under
Miliband, we had nothing to say to the faraway towns of England,’ one senior
Labour figure told me.
By which
he meant, Miliband’s cerebral socialism might have been popular among
metropolitan liberals but it emphatically did not resonate with the skilled
working and lower middle classes in small towns in places such as Essex,
Bedfordshire, Kent, Hertfordshire …
As I wrote
last November, in a column that precipitated a leadership crisis (there were,
for a time, reports of attempted coups and secret letters circulating), Ed
Miliband has a quasi-Marxist worldview.
His great
obsession is political economy. He believes that if you change the economic
base of a nation, you change the soul of its people. Rent controls, energy
price freezes and heavy redistributive taxation were the means by which he
believed the State would set about taming the ‘predatory’ forces of capitalism
and building the ‘good society’.
As soon as
he became leader, Miliband was eager to distance himself from the Blair years,
even the successes, and this merely angered many of his MPs.
His focus
on economic matters was exceptionally narrow. He had a theoretical
understanding of business and poverty but no practical experience of either.
Unlike
Blair, who understood the value of middle-class aspiration, Miliband seldom
spoke about education (even though state academies were the creation of New
Labour) or Britain’s place in the world. He never discussed public service
reform or wealth creation.
Far too
late, he made a desperate attempt to reframe Labour as the party of fiscal
rectitude by including a so-called ‘budget responsibility lock’ [which
guaranteed that every policy in Labour’s manifesto was fully funded without
requiring any additional borrowing] — a matter of months after forgetting to
mention the deficit in his party conference speech.
‘Ed spent
his whole leadership in the bunker,’ I was told this week by one despairing
former confidante. ‘Don’t forget, he spent all those years in the bunker
alongside Gordon Brown and Ed Balls. That shaped him. He had a siege mentality,
and he thrived on it.’
Meanwhile,
Miliband failed to glimpse, even out of the corner of his eye, what was
unfolding in Scotland, where Labour used to weigh the votes in constituencies
that, in some cases, had all the characteristics of rotten boroughs.
The party
sent its brightest talents to London and introduced a botched devolution
settlement. George Robertson, the former Labour defence secretary, boasted that
devolution would ‘kill Scottish nationalism stone dead’.
Instead,
it empowered the SNP and fired its ambitions, allowing Alex Salmond and Nicola
Sturgeon to claim all Scotland’s successes as their own, while its failures
could be blamed on Westminster.
The Labour
collapse in Scotland has been dramatic in its totality and rapidity, but in
truth it was a long time in the making.
A few
prescient politicians such as Douglas Alexander, the former shadow foreign
secretary who lost his seat to a 20-year-old student, understood how
nationalism and identity politics were profoundly changing his homeland.
But
Alexander, who led David Miliband’s doomed leadership campaign, was another
senior colleague not fully trusted by Ed Miliband.
To the
last, Miliband remained complacent about the rise of the SNP and ended up even
more unpopular in Scotland than David Cameron. Not once during the election
campaign did he feel confident enough to take his message directly to the
Scottish people on the streets or at public meetings.
His visits
there were few, and always tightly choreographed. It was almost as if he were
some kind of fugitive, being hurried in and out of a hostile land.
Labour MPs
often complained to me about Miliband’s small team of closest advisers and the
effect they were having on him. Having won the leadership because of the
overwhelming support of the unions, he never really trusted many of his MPs.
In the
early years of his leadership he felt isolated, and was especially suspicious
of Ed Balls, with whom he worked as an aide under Gordon Brown at the Treasury
and whose respect he never fully won.
Miliband
surrounded himself with a small group of like-minded, scholarly, middle-aged
men: most notable were Stewart Wood, a former Oxford academic, and Marc Stears,
also an academic and an old friend of Miliband’s from Oxford University who
wrote many of his speeches.
It created
a peculiar kind of group-think. Their meetings had the atmosphere of lofty
seminars; but then no one around Miliband had run or set up a business.
Throughout
his leadership and encouraged by his supporters, Miliband liked to style
himself as an ‘insurgent’, challenging a nefarious establishment: big business,
the Press barons, the energy companies.
Some of
his positioning was bold and, indeed, courageous — especially when he defied
David Cameron and refused to support British strikes against the Assad regime
in Syria in 2013.
But it
never seemed to dawn on him that he, too, was an emblematically establishment
figure. He just happened to be a member of a different establishment from the
Prime Minister. That of the liberal metropolitan elite.
In my
view, a more nimble leader than Miliband, one with broader life experience,
would have seized the opportunity presented by the collapse of support for the
Lib Dems and the rise of UKIP, which divided the Right and caused deep unrest
among the Tories.
A more
nimble leader would have looked beyond Labour’s core vote and attempted to
appeal not just to a faction but to most of the people, most of the time.
The
British are, on the whole, fair-minded and generous spirited. They are rightly
sceptical of ideology and grand schemes to remake society. And, despite the
blindness of the polls, it’s clear that they made up their mind about Ed
Miliband almost as soon as he became Labour leader.
As it
turned out, nothing that he did or said during the protracted election campaign
— no boast about his toughness nor late-night tryst with Russell Brand — would
change the people’s fundamental view that he was simply not up to the job of
being prime minister.
Now Labour has to clear a
path through the rubble.
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