Labour leadership trio perpetuate Blair-Brown years
The Milibands and Ed Balls only reinforce the status quo when the Labour party needs a fighter to galvanise members
o Peter Kilfoyle
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 May 2010 15.00 BST
I was surprised to read Neil Kinnock's weekend panegyric in support of Ed Miliband. After all, Kinnock had left parliament 13 years before his candidate's election to the Commons a mere five years ago. Prior to that, Ed Miliband was a humble researcher within Gordon Brown's team. Thus, I am mystified as to the basis upon which Kinnock's enthusiasm for Ed Miliband is built.
I have to assume it is a social experience of Ed Miliband. They had never worked together; and, having spent five years alongside the younger of the two precocious politician brothers, I fail to recognise the panoply of political and personal talents so admired by Kinnock.
Yet perhaps this is one of the difficulties which humble members in the provinces face. We do not have the social interaction so beloved of the London-based chattering classes, and the influence they exert on processes such as the selection of a new Labour party leader.
Left to our social (and, so they would have it, intellectual and political) superiors in the capital, there would probably be a choice of no more than three candidates – Ed and David Miliband, and Ed Balls. Having failed to bounce the party into a selection of David Miliband by acclamation, Labour's self-appointed great and good have now been forced to widen the selection options in number and in time. It must be a great disappointment to Lords Mandelson, Falconer and Adonis – among others – to find an ungrateful and impertinent party demurring from their judgements.
Indeed, it is a measure of the decline of the party that we have the three leading contenders we do, and who are being heavily promoted. In background, there is little between them. Each has that narrow set of experiences seemingly mandatory for contemporary party leaders – Oxbridge, research, and political bagcarrying. Life experience outside of that restricted world is nonexistent, and their politics are apparently of the pick-and-mix variety.
David Miliband was parachuted into the safe Labour seat of South Shields after its previous member was put in the Lords. It was similarly an open secret that Normanton was being kept warm for Ed Balls by his predecessor Bill O'Brien. Awkwardly, the Boundary Commission carved up that seat, so Colin Challen obligingly stepped aside for Balls's benefit in the Morley seat.
Meanwhile, the younger Miliband was parachuted into the safe seat of Doncaster North after the untimely death of the local member, Kevin Hughes.
What is truly astonishing is that while Miliband major has served all of nine years as a member of parliament, Miliband minor and Ed Balls were both first elected only in 2005. It was widely believed at the time that they were shoehorned into seats to look after the interests of their long-term boss, Gordon Brown. It now seems as if it was for premature promotion.
Indeed, this trio of hopefuls look set to perpetuate the Blair-Brown years; and a London-centric perspective of the Labour party would continue to be the case. Although each has a northern seat, they are not of the north.
Their politics are not even those of London but those of the Westminster and Whitehall villages; theirs are the politics of spin, not of conviction; of advancement, not of service; of an elite, not of a wider political community. Their political apprenticeships were served in the rival courts of Blair and Brown rather than on the mean streets of Britain.
It is, therefore, very depressing for Labour members throughout the country to see the same old charade in the build up to what, for millions of people, will be a vital election. Whoever wins will be expected to take the fight to the new government as their cuts deeply divide the nation in the traditional Tory manner. Our supporters will not be looking for a charmer, advantageous though that sometimes may be. They will be looking for a fighter who will galvanise members and the wider electorate to oppose the decimation of public services being planned. That leader will not be of the centre-right. We have seen where that took us under Tony Blair. Anyway, as David Cameron himself puts it, the coalition is centre-right and he is the heir to Blair.
The country is crying out for a break from what was presented in the past as consensual politics. Our loyal supporters want us to fight for them, recognising that clever talk of triangulation is a betrayal of those most loyal and most dependent on Labour. Away from the spin and the mealy mouthed rhetoric, our intrepid trio offer only more of the same.
That is just not good enough. They have neither the real roots in the wider party, nor the established ideological commitment, to offer either real opposition in the short term or a bankable alternative to the present coalition at a general election. I say to my party colleagues when they choose – be aware and be very careful.
Labour leadership trio perpetuate Blair-Brown years | Peter Kilfoyle | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Labour leadership trio perpetuate Blair-Brown years
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