Friday 17 May 2013

Time for Ed to lead

Once again the Labour party is being spared embarrassment by Tory divisions over Europe. It is a familiar pattern. When the Conservatives are quiet and organised the spotlight falls on Ed Miliband. He appears to mumble or fluff his lines. The script isn’t gripping the audience. Labour MPs shuffle uncomfortably in their seats. It all starts to look a bit awkward. And then everyone’s attention is distracted by fighting somewhere off to the right of the stage, an unseemly scuffle that looks as if it might end up with David Cameron falling on his backside or being dragged into the wings never to return.

Yet there is another familiar cycle that afflicts the Labour side. It is the pattern of doubt over the viability of Miliband’s bid for power being filtered through the urge to remove Ed Balls from the shadow Treasury brief. The argument is well-rehearsed and has two pillars.

First is the belief that Labour will not persuade wavering voters that it has something fresh and exciting to say about the economy (a pre-condition for victory) as long as the man delivering its main economic message is perceived as an incarnation of the politics and fiscal strategy of Gordon Brown. The second concern is that Balls is congenitally opposed to any public rehearsal of ideas for reforming the way government and the state function; that he is a classic Treasury centraliser and sceptical about the need to urge innovation in the public sector.

The real tension is both subtler and more profound. It is between the need to defend Labour’s legacy of investment in public services and the impulse to imagine different ways of effecting social change. It is the dilemma of how to rehabilitate the abstract principle that government can be the citizen’s friend while also attacking the current government as a menace to society.

The uselessness of the coalition is coming to be seen not just as a measure of Cameron’s deficiency, but of Miliband’s inability to press home an advantage.

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