Why Ed Should Stay Red

It didn't take long for the knives to come out for the new (note the significant small 'n') Labour leader Ed Miliband (or MiliE, as some of the less kind Conservative press have dubbed him.)

Within hours of his appointment, he had acquired several nicknames, with perhaps 'Red Ed' being the most insidious. The suggestion was made in several of the more militant Conservative newspapers that Ed was 'in the pocket of the unions'. Well, it was certainly their votes that put him in charge and consigned his brother to the political scrapheap.

It seems like every time that unions are mentioned in the mainstream press, we harp back to the winter of discontent, rubbish uncollected in the streets, miners being mercilessly crushed by Margaret Thatcher. Never mind that the reality - an odd hour or two's delay on the London Underground or at an airport in the name of safety and entirely deserved wage equality - is very different in the modern era.

And yet, it was Ed himself who was quick to distance himself from those who had pushed him over the line. He was, he said, very much his own man - the cannier amongst us might well see this as an attempt to distance himself from the Blairite days of Brown and Mandelson as much as an association with blood-red socialism. Then, days later, Ed admitted that he wasn't against cuts on principle, just the speed with which they were being proposed. The unionites who voted for him must have been spluttering into their morning tea.

Why then, have we absorbed the idea that red is bad? After all, we are not America, with its dyed-in-the-wool fear that socialism will destroy the 'free' part of the free market. Socialism remains one of our country's proud traditions, it being representative of the staunch backbone of England, the van-driving, street-sweeping, hospital-cleaning working classes. Union membership in this country numbers in the millions and militancy is at its highest level for years.

Their efforts are having an impact too. Chris Huhne, a liberal minister and economist yesterday admitted that planned public sector cuts may be 'scaled back'. This is political speak that the coalition have used a few times in the past week, and smacks of there being more public opposition to their plans than they expected.

William Dove in the International Business Times makes the point that Labour being affiliated to the unions invites the same derision that it would if the Conservative Party were to affiliate itself with private businesses. Certainly the Byzantine, undemocratic methods that the Labour Party uses to pick a leader should be revised - the current system sees individuals with multiple memberships of affiliated organisations getting multiple votes, and that does indeed call the outcomes into question.

Still, I feel that Dove misses the point somewhat. The Conservative Party was not born of big business in the same way that the Labour Party was girded from the loins of the labour movement. The Tories are more than capable of looking out for their own interests, while the Labour Party was created by necessity to give a voice to those who had none. Furthermore, given the donations received from businesses and the behind-the-scenes lobbying conducted by senior business figures, it is not a large leap to imagine that big business still has direct and influential access to ministerial ears.

The real challenge for the Labour Party and its followers is the need to evolve with the people who have made it so successful in the past. New Labour pitched itself firmly in the ground between the benefit recipients who drained it so thoroughly of strength and impetus and the nouveau riche who shouted proudly that they were still working class while also doing everything in their power to ensure that little Emily and Joshua got into that nice public school on the village green. By chasing two rabbits, they effectively lost both.

Remember that without the Liberal Democrats, this government would be struggling to achieve anything by majority. Ed Miliband can afford to wait for the cuts to do their damage to public confidence, and then like a master surgeon he can take a scalpel neatly to the clear divisions within the coalition. Best of all, he doesn't have to betray his faithful followers in order to take the party back to the people - he simply has to identify with their needs and struggles while acknowledging their concerns and their hard work, and he can do all of that while still proudly waving a red flag.

What a Difference a Week Makes

I don't quite know why it is that I've needed such a long break from the blogosphere, but for those of you who have missed my input, I have decided to sum up events during my absence with a few brief bullet points. They are as follows:

1) Miliband the Younger wins Labour leadership contest, mainly due to support from the trade unions.

2) Miliband the Older throws his toys from the pram, giving up Cabinet politics at the time that his party needs him the most.

3) Coalition government continues to tell lies about the necessity to make swingeing cuts in any local government department that looks at them funny. They ringfence defence spending (contractors make fat profits, and it's a glorious throwback to colonial days to have British soldiers swanning around the globe) and also health spending (because cutting that would be unpopular.)

4) Gideon 'George' Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer and beneficiary of a trust fund estimated to be worth £4 million pounds, proposes cuts to child benefit. At the party conference, evident panic at the child benefit backlash causes David Cameron to hint that there will be forthcoming tax breaks for married couples, regardless of earnings.

I'm drawing attention to this little policy idisyncracy, as it clearly benefits the middle classes and the rich over the poorer members of society, who are more likely to be single parents and low earners.

Osborne will hold centre stage for the next couple of weeks in the news, at least until the inevitable bad news is released in the comprehensive spending review on 20th October 2010. Incidentally, Guido Fawkes ran a piece in his blog in August which stated that George Osborne was the most popular Tory Chancellor in modern history. I'll be running another piece about Osborne in the near future, as he is also currently topping the Old Statesman 'Smug, Dictatorial Rich Politician Most in Need of a Slap' poll.

A Liberal Gamble

I have spent the last day or two watching pictures come out of the Liberal Democrat Conference in Liverpool, and I wonder if I am the only one who has my head in my my hands when I hear Nick Clegg speaking.

In contrast to the way that Vince Cable strains at the leash, mouth foaming in his restrained desire to put capitalism to the sword, Clegg seems limp and deceitful, a man who postured pre-election firmly at the side of the centre left that forms the backbone of his own party but knows all too well that he is now sleeping with the enemy and is in way too deep to pull out.

The chilly echo that greeted his keynote speech at the party conference is all too telling. Liberal voters have been swift to denounce the Orange Book cognoscenti within the party and many are now of the opinion that the party has completely sold out to the Conservatives. By moving away from the core of his own support, Clegg is now running a lonely three-legged race with David Cameron, and faces the likelihood that while failure to resolve the crisis within the country will see blame apportioned equally, credit for any successes is unlikely to be shared by the blue half of government.

These are unique and uncomfortable times for the Orange Book politicians. Regrettably for the Liberal Democrats, many of their big name politicians are not, in fact, big names at all. Chris Huhne, Mark Oaten and Susan Kramer are not the profiles that will save the party from rejection by its own faithful. In Vince Cable they have at least one extremely knowledgable and respected trump card; however, he is bogged down in the unpopular Royal Mail privatisation debate, and will not win internal political arguments about bank taxes and bonuses.

As the stakes are raised progressively higher in the coming months as those bank bonuses continue unabated and the real scale of economic cuts becomes apparent to the voter on the street, I believe that Clegg will begin to look increasingly like a man gambling in a casino at stakes where he simply cannot afford to lose. Clegg spoke earlier in the week about the 'quiet courage' of the party in choosing to form a coalition government with the Conservatives. These are fine words which fool no-one, and he will not genuinely expect things amongst his own party to stay quiet for long.

But then, this is a new kind of politics, and Clegg speaks of taking risks in government. His supporters will hope that he is aware of just what kind of risk he is taking. The very future of his party is at stake. However, rather than acknowledge this truth, it seems that Clegg has taken to the ether and started to believe his own hype. The Liberal Democrats are, after all, the new kingmakers - it just seems that somewhere along the line, they have begun to fool themselves that they are the kings.