On Course For Victory

He says some very silly things along the way, but Simon Heffer can see which way the wind is blowing:

When you watch Labour’s two most prominent figures — Ed Miliband, the leader, and Ed Balls, his shadow chancellor — you could be forgiven for thinking that their party remains unelectable. The former seems to embody incompetence; the latter, brutish dishonesty. It is a toxic cocktail. Both men’s flaws were on display this week. Mr Miliband seemed unsure whether he should support Wednesday’s public sector strike — which went off half-cock. Indeed, despite immigration officers striking, checks at airports were actually handled more efficiently than usual and the only people who suffered a change in their routine were schoolchildren whose teachers had walked out.

For his part, Mr Balls gave a bravura performance of mendacity when he replied to George Osborne’s Autumn Statement on Tuesday. Such was his chutzpah that voters could have been forgiven for forgetting that he had been complicit in creating the worst economic crisis since the 1930s and for thinking that his current prescription for rescuing the economy (borrowing yet more money and thus plunging Britain into bankruptcy) is the way forward. But the truth is that the public is not impressed. A survey this week showed that roughly twice as many people trust David Cameron and Mr Osborne to improve our economic prospects rather than the two Eds.

The poll was taken before Tuesday, and Mr Balls’s disgraceful Commons performance (when he was also the butt of one of the Chancellor’s better jokes) will certainly not have improved his standing. Mr Osborne said that while Mr Balls had been responsible for Britain’s current economic disaster, Mr Miliband had merely been ‘doing the photocopying’ at the time. The Tories regard Mr Miliband as a political pygmy. This view was reinforced in a remark made to me this week by a cross-bench peer who, referring to the way Mr Miliband surprised many by standing for Labour leader, said that ‘the public know only two things about Ed Miliband — that he shafted his brother and upset their mother’.

In addition to the ineptitude of Mr Miliband and the dishonesty of Mr Balls, the Tories believe that they have a powerful weapon over Labour: the fact that voters will never forget that the party was culpable in creating the economic mess we are in. The profligate tax, spend and borrowing policies that Labour followed — and which Mr Balls helped Gordon Brown design — made things far, far worse in Britain than they need have been. Few people are stupid enough to accept the line peddled by Lord Mandelson that the crisis was imported from America.

The Tories argue that it took 18 years for the public to forget the Winter of Discontent that occurred under the government of Labour’s Jim Callaghan in 1979. Similarly, they hope that the catastrophic events of 2008-10 will stick in the memory just as easily. However, I believe there are fundamental errors in this analysis, and that Mr Cameron is dangerously blind to the potential for Labour to form the next government. It did not take the country 18 years to forget the Winter of Discontent. It simply took 18 years before Labour became electable again.

After 1979, the party was in turmoil. It had split between Left-wing followers of Tony Benn and social democrats. It had allowed the so-called ‘Loony Left’ to take control of councils all over urban Britain. And it had been heavily infiltrated by the hard-Left Militant Tendency. In addition, it had embraced both unilateral nuclear disarmament and calls for the nationalisation of whole sectors of the economy. In 1983 it fought a General Election on a manifesto that one of its senior MPs, Sir Gerald Kaufman, correctly termed ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Compared with those days, Labour is now in much better shape. There are no serious internal divisions and — despite his charisma defect — Mr Miliband has the full support of his party. Of course, there are some MPs who would like him replaced, but many of his colleagues realise nothing would torpedo their chances of returning to power more than a bout of civil war. In other words, the lessons of the early 1980s have been learned.

Labour is nine points ahead in the polls. It won 258 seats in the last election when the wholesale damage done to Britain by 13 years of the Blair/Brown Government was fresh in voters’ minds. For the truth is that although Mr Miliband remains unpopular with the public, his image is slowly improving. A cunning media strategy ensures his principal appearances on television occur during carefully planned visits to factories, hospitals and businesses when he comes across as looking concerned and interested in ordinary people’s lives. Also, Labour is increasingly effective at getting some of its more able front-benchers on television to distract attention from the two Eds. For example, Yvette Cooper — so much more sympathetic than her thuggish husband Ed Balls — has blossomed in her job as shadow home secretary and seems frequently to get the better of her Tory counterpart, Theresa May.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, is a former central banker with serious experience of the financial world. She is hardly off the news channels, where she provides articulate insights into the financial crisis. Also ubiquitous in the media is Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary. He is 33, a City solicitor, smooth, clever and charismatic. The Tory front bench is struggling to match such effective voices and to get such positive media exposure. As well as promoting these attractive shadow ministers, Labour is — either shrewdly or cynically, depending upon your point of view — developing less threatening policies. The party has adroitly thrown off its Blairite slavishness towards Europe and is now talking of defending policy opt-outs secured from Brussels, refusing to allow any further transfer of powers without public consultation and holding out the possibility of repatriating unspecified powers.

And while Labour cannot attack the Coalition for its economic policies without risking a charge of rank hypocrisy, it can — and does — argue that the measures being taken to put things right are unnecessarily harsh. Labour is brilliant at depicting the poor as victims — the Coalition’s victims. Its spokesmen constantly point out that hard-working families’ incomes are falling, and will continue to do so as long as the austerity programme continues. It has also made a strong case that the poor — although it does not differentiate, as the Victorians did, between the deserving and the undeserving — are being made to pay disproportionately for the mistakes of the rich, notably the bankers.

Indeed, perhaps the party’s cleverest strategy is its appeal to women, thus allying itself with that section of the population who provide the majority of NHS staff, work in the caring services and look after children, the elderly and the disabled. What’s more, Labour is benefiting from the fact that, for whatever reasons, women do not warm to Mr Cameron’s brand of charm. So, while Labour looks as though it is floundering, it may well be on course for victory at the next election. What’s more, the Tories, by refusing to entertain an alternative economic policy — and looking increasingly like a rabbit in the headlights of a crashing world economy — are in danger of helping make that happen.