If Ed Miliband loses the General Election on May 7th/8th 2015, he’ll be toast.
It would change the mood music enormously. Dan Hodges would say something to the effect of ‘I told you so’. Len McCluskey might pull a rabbit out of his hat.
I know many people amongst grassroots Labour supporters and members, though, who would defend Ed Miliband to the hilt.
They dismiss criticism of him as ‘weird’ as merely a red herring, to be expected of smear campaigns.
They remind us that geeks will inherit the earth (though no-one can remember quite who said this – was it Jarvis Cocker?)
We’ve been told on numerous occasions to be patient for the meticulous deliberations of the Labour policy reviews. But there has been concern that the outcome might be the bland leading the bland, and is ideologically of no fixed abode.
Bill Bailey, the star of Black Books, predicting the results of the general election in 2015, he described Labour leader Ed Miliband, rather unflatteringly, as being “like a plastic bag caught in a tree.”
“No one knows how he got up there and no one can be bothered to get him down,” he said.
Bailey, who had appeared in Labour’s 2010 general election broadcasts, spoke about his growing dissatisfaction with the Labour party earlier this year.
“I find them increasingly frustrating because there seems to be a lack of direction,” he said in January.
The problem here is that this plastic bag might suddenly get blown off course with a forceful gust of wind. This bag could lead Labour into an ideological outer space, though it probably is more helpful of it potentially spending some time in the wilderness.
Ed Miliband, one knows, is capable of populist campaigns, such as on phone hacking or energy prices. But it is unclear whether these cumulatively lead to a sustained strategy.
David Cameron, love him or loathe him, does find it easy to score easily political points, such as this week reminding Miliband that he’s the first leader of the Opposition asking for someone’s resignation after he or she has resigned.
In as much Ed Miliband, or Labour, can be criticised, one of the key problems seems to be that, despite having had a clear success on energy prices, they do appear to lag sometimes on key political narratives.
One example is welfare, conceding a ‘benefit cap’ after the Conservatives. A second totemic issue is the economy, advocating a need for austerity, despite considerable opposition from a sizeable proportion of the membership of the Labour Party.
The Labour Party also seems to drift with ideological mist and fog on other key issues, such as privatisation. It complains about the operational mechanism of the flotation, though having been in favour of the Royal Mail privatisation.
Underlying this unease for Labour is that they should miles ahead in the polls by now. And yet they seem unable to fix their nails to the mast over issues they should have decided a long time ago. What are they going to do about the private finance initiative in hospitals? Also, do they agree with High Speed 2 while endorsing ‘efficiency savings’ in the NHS?
This might appear as if Ed Miliband wants to reveal all the ‘goodies’, such as proposals for a national living wage, nearer the time. But by that stage they might be so far down their chosen path that the plastic bag is likely to be blown away at any second.
There is no doubt that many people want Ed Miliband to succeed. There is no doubt that this current Government has not only made massive operational errors, but they have a nasty ‘out of touch’ image which refuses to go away.
But Ed Miliband knows that this will be insufficient to win a massive landslide on its own. He is personally liked by many, and is known to be far from trivial in his political outlook. He has also begun to identify something highly potent as an idea: that unfettered markets cannot always be trusted to work for the public good.
Ed Miliband needs to ‘go back to basics’. This doesn’t require open letters from think tanks. This requires common sense on his part, such as listening to and acting upon concerns of disabled citizens. This means listening to and acting upon the concerns of those citizens who find them insecure in any form of under-employment.
It’s actually low hanging fruit on the same tree with that same plastic bag. One is hoping that Ed Miliband is looking in the right direction.
