In Its Gut

Although I do not share his low view of Ed Miliband, Tim Stanley writes:

Ed Miliband is planning to (slightly) sever the Labour/union link, or at least to weaken it by chewing wetly on the rope with those tombstone teeth. Some clever types are calling this his Clause Four moment. It could be better described as “stabbing your friends in the back”.

That’s what it’s called when you turn on the very people who helped elect you because you think kicking a friend in public is worth a few points in the polls. Yes, Tony Blair did this to the unions all the time, and he won three elections in a row because many voters admired him for it. But this isn’t the early noughties, and Ed is no Tony. He’s barely a Gordon or a Neil.

Let’s start by clearing up a few facts. It looks like something bad happened with the Unite candidate in Falkirk, but an internal Labour report also found that another candidate seeking selection had done something dodgy when it came to recruiting new members – and this has been oddly underreported.

If Unite was trying to fix an MP’s selection, so what? It’s a labour union and this is the Labour Party. It’s axiomatic that unions should try to exert influence upon the selection of candidates for the party that their money finances, and it has been ever thus. Unite, by the way, is not an exclusively public sector union (there’s been a lot of nonsense talked about a public sector takeover of the Labour Party) and it’s not even very good at fixin’ things (only nine of 41 United-endorsed candidates have won Labour nominations).

And I would much rather that candidate selection was controlled by the unions than by a narrow clique in Westminster. Remember that whole Blairite thing in the 1990s, when a bunch of media consultants and PR gurus forced supine, dull and dumb candidates upon constituencies ? Those Blair babes and Blair eunuchs were the boys and girls who voted for the Iraq War, PFI, tuition fees and the war on civil liberties. I'd take a thousand Dennis Skinners over one of them.

No, Ed Miliband’s troubles don’t come from the unions, which are dwindling in number and have enjoyed only minimal influence in Labour politics since 1992. His problems begin with two rather more contemporary sources. First, the Blairites. Labour would be doing a lot better in the polls if the public could only trust it. 

But bitter memories of the legacy of Blairism – specifically an illegal war in Iraq and pandering to financial institutions with all the moral restraint of Caligula on the pull – make it very difficult for Miliband to overcome the general suspicion that Labour post-Blair is a lacking in either character or principle.

It wasn’t the Left that destroyed Labour’s reputation in the last decade; it was the Right – the very Right who are agitating for a war on Unite. I don’t write that as a call for a return to socialism; voters don’t want to nationalise M&S just yet. But Labour needs to confront the mistakes made in its Blairite past as much as it does its Militant tendency.

That would require genuine leadership, something that Ed has hitherto lacked. For Miliband’s second big problem is himself. He is the Julia Gillard of UK politics – worthy, probably quite nice, but lacking in fibre, unconvincing and fundamentally unlikeable. There’s that strange accent that wanders from region to region in search of words to kill (he is the first man to pronounce the word “year” with three syllables).

There’s the hair that can’t decide if it’s grey, black or Dalmatian dog. And there’s his odd tendency to lose track of the world mid-sentence and break away from his speech to contemplate some elusive spot in the far distance that the rest of us can’t see. Where does your mind go to in those moments, Ed? I like to imagine he sees monkeys frolicking on swings.

What his mind does not contemplate is history, for Miliband eschews this with adolescent ego. He lacks care for Labour’s bifurcated philosophical tradition. One half is its working-class protectionism: patriotic, anti-globalisation, populist, “jobs for the boys” etc. The other is its socialist romanticism – its endless, often hopeless, quest to banish poverty and end war. The two halves combined produces a British socialism that is less dogmatic than it is spiritual.

After the collapse of Marxist economics, the Labour movement’s historic crusade became to civilise capitalism, to foster a society that puts people before profit and encourages the individual to aspire to something more than just making money. Ed Miliband seems disconnected from this politics of the heart; he prefers to find comfort in detail and wonkery. You get the impression that he goes home at night and snuggles up to a warm bar chart.

Ed’s latest war on the union smacks of cold calculation, that clever-clever tendency among some Labourites to think they can strategise and triangulate their way to victory. It won’t work. Only a total severance of the union link would satisfy the pundits and earn him the badge of Blairite courage, and by falling far short of that, his proposals will irritate his base and create a new narrative of Labour internal division. If he does agitate the troops, Ed will deserve all the aggravation he gets. He doesn’t understand that Labour is, in its gut, about loyalty – loyalty to a class, a region, a people, a movement.

If Labour turns its backs on the unions then it isn’t worth very much at all. It becomes yet another neo-liberal party led by a sad man with a lisp.