Ever since Ed Miliband’s last big speech – the one where, like a penitent priest, he recanted the old politics, embraced the new, and gave his erstwhile friends the trade unions a calculated kicking to prove he meant it – I’ve been puzzled.
Not by the speech itself, which was agreeably dashing, jammed as it was with pithy sound bites and brimming with just the right amount of sorrowful, virtuous anger. It was, I thought, a shrewd piece of political steering in what had become perilous rapids.
But then I read the papers, and the blogs, and listened to the radio. And, oh hell, did I become confused. Why was everyone so excited?
According to The Daily Telegraph, Miliband’s trade union speech was one of “the biggest gambles of his political career”; The Guardian described it as “historic” and “a vital test”; The Evening Standard as “gutsy”. Even Tony Blair called it “a defining moment.”
So now I keep re-reading Ed’s speech, searching for the momentous I’ve so far missed. That “Clause Four Moment”. But I still can’t find it.
The proposed policies are solid enough, if not particularly original. The most important – that three million trade union members will get to choose whether to opt in to a £3 political donation – is also the most politically challenging. But none of it is earth-shattering.
And it’s more about expediency than guts. If it wasn’t for the Falkirk scandal – because scandal it is – Ed Miliband wouldn’t have bothered to scramble up a hasty “new politics”, or sought to reform the party’s links with the trade union movement. Weeks of critical headlines left him with no choice. Only days before Miliband’s “historic” speech, and before the police were finally called in, Labour was still spinning furiously that Falkirk was, well, just one rogue constituency.
In other words, Miliband’s speech was about as brave as jumping out of a ground floor window when your house is on fire.
There’s still no timetable for when the changes will be introduced; nothing on what amendments to party rules will be required. It’s not quite in the long grass yet, but we already know any changes will take two years at least to implement. Assuming they ever are.
When Tony Blair, five months after becoming Labour leader, jettisoned the party’s 76-year-old constitution – most notably its commitment to nationalisation – Ken Livingstone described it as “a giant waste of time”. The last thing Labour needed was months of internal wrangling. It would look self-indulgent, and could prove self-destructive. Dennis Skinner denounced it as a “total and unnecessary diversion” from the fight against John Major’s Tory government.
They were both wrong, of course. Because the decision to ditch Clause Four was about demonstrating to Britain that Labour had changed. It wasn’t the party of unemployment, or taxation, or nationalisation anymore. It was progressive, invigorated. It was New. And Britain understood that, and believed it. That’s why Tony Blair won three general elections.
Politicians are always talking about the “new politics”. Miliband’s speech reminded me of Gordon Brown’s on a “new constitution” in the dying days of the last Labour government.
“I believe that the choice before us is clear,” he said. “Whether we advance towards a new politics, where individuals have more say and more control over their lives or whether – by doing nothing, or by design – we retreat into a discredited old politics, leaving power concentrated in the hands of the old elites.”
It’s all thrillingly, air-punchingly egalitarian stuff. But then it always is. “What we saw in Falkirk is part of the death-throes of the old politics,” Ed Miliband tells us. Oh yes, the old shuttered, mechanistic, hateful politics of yore. If the debacle of Falkirk has done anything, it’s forced us to finally look at the politely coughing elephant in the corner. Labour and the trade unions are the old elites. They have been for years. And one speech isn’t going to change a thing.
There are two years to go before the next election. There’s a lot to prove. Labour’s running out of time.
Kath Raymond Hinton 