David Miliband: criticising Cameron is not enough
Posted on Wednesday 30 July, 2008
Filed Under New Labour
The first rule of Fight Club – according to Tyler Durden, hero of the Chuck Palahniuk novel of that very name – is that you do not talk about Fight Club; the second rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club.
Similar stipulations seem to apply to the current undeclared contest to replace the prime minister. It is inadmissible plainly to state that you are in the running.
Yet even though David Miliband’s piece in the Guardian this morning doesn’t mention Gordon Brown once, it is widely being interpreted as a subtle piece of positioning. Subtle is the operative word; as gissajob rallying calls to the progressive left go, few socialists will have found it inspirational.
The main contention of the article seems to be an assertion that Labour can somehow win the next election, despite the current evidence of the polls, because it has a defined project and the Conservatives do not.
For Miliband (pictured), there is nothing essentially wrong – bar one or two ‘shortcomings’, of course – with what New Labour has being doing since 1997. Its problem has essentially been one of getting the message across.
Does this man really not get it? Labour’s difficulty is not so much that the nuances of its policies are misunderstood, but rather that the main thrust is understood all too well and is deeply unpopular with the electorate.
Thus Miliband can maintain with a straight face that the government should be kicking itself for not pushing NHS privatisation harder and faster and for not having an exit plan for Iraq.
The reality is that millions of people object to British participation in the US oil grab on principle, while widespread clamour for greater private sector involvement in the health service just does not exist. You’ve obviously been listening to the wrong focus groups, Dave.
Nor will it do to blame a reified ‘Wall Street’ for the economic situation, after a decade of repeated insistence that Britain’s recent prosperity has been the result of the prudence with a purpose emanating from Number Eleven. Cock-ups such as the 10p tax band fiasco are still fresh in the public mind.
Most worrying of all is to hear Margaret Thatcher praised as a radical not a conservative, and then be told a few paragraphs later that the times demand a ‘radical new phrase’. That may have been a Freudian slip, but it says a lot about Mr Miliband’s instinct.
The Blairite ‘radical centre’ – the intellectual heritage that our prime minister regards as his rightful legacy – is not the negation of Thatcherism, but its completion.
If Miliband does get the gig he so plainly covets yet sticks to the limitations imposed by neoliberal orthodoxy, he’ll find out that it isn’t enough to belittle Cameronism intellectually as little more than the detoxification of the Tory brand.
Right now, the Tories are poised to take office by the cunning but effective expedient of not being the Labour Party, and that is all they need to do. At a time when even the British National Party can outpoll Labour in a by-election, surely a little detox wouldn’t hurt New Labour either.
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Comments
9 Responses to “David Miliband: criticising Cameron is not enough”
If anything, it’s you who doesn’t get it, Dave. Any deviation from the paths laid down by New Labour are certain to lead to defeat. A lurch to the left now would be disastrous.
“That may have been a Freudian slip, but it says a lot about Mr Miliband’s instinct”.
And they certainly do have a Freud in the inner sanctum along with Brown’s other unelected capitalist and private equity pals.
“If anything, it’s you who doesn’t get it, Dave. Any deviation from the paths laid down by New Labour are certain to lead to defeat. A lurch to the left now would be disastrous.”
Er, Blairite do you exist on a alternate universe or are you sticking your fingers in your ears singing, “la, la, la…I aint listening cos NL is doing a fine job and you lot are being ‘orrible”….
Btw Blairite (and if you are for real) so the current neo-liberal political trajectory isn’t going to lead to further disasters? Defeat is inevitable, mate!
Wake up and smell the stench of NL…. the project has failed. The Tory avalanche is on its way.
This is a defining moment for the Left and it is possibly our last best hope.
blairite,
New Labour has been a disaster its aleinated its core vote, its aleinated party members, 200,000 members have left, and most of them would have been activists. I was talking to a Labour Party member recently and he told me the last CLP meeting he went to only 3 people attended.
It’s a pity David Miliband didn’t listen to his father more when he was young, he might of been a Socialist.
“Right now, the Tories are poised to take office by the cunning but effective expedient of not being the Labour Party, and that is all they need to do. At a time when even the British National Party can outpoll Labour in a by-election, surely a little detox wouldn’t hurt New Labour either.”
Change BNP to NF and you’ve got 1979.
That bit of detox worked out ok for the Labour Party and the people of Britain and was over quickly.
No wait, it didn’t, and it wasn’t.
Dave – “Does this man really not get it? Labour’s difficulty is not so much that the nuances of its policies are misunderstood, but rather that the main thrust is understood all too well and is deeply unpopular with the electorate.”
The thing is, none of them get it, as the first comment demonstrates. The thought that the vast majority of people are to the left of them on all the key issues such as the war, tax and public services just cannot enter their heads.
Their default position is tacking to the right, which makes them even more unpopular and allows a rightward moving Cameron to portray the Tories as more reasonable. On current going, the Tories are to the left of Labour on many things, and on the vile welfare ‘reforms’, their strongest supporters, probably delighted that they will be able to inherit the new welfare regime rather than make themselves unpopular by introducing it themselves.
There was a throwaway comment in the Guardian that tickled me, something about the gamut of left to right in the Labour Party ranging from Ed Balls to Alan Milburn. Partly tickled because it said ‘Balls to Alan Milburn’, an admirable sentiment, partly because I can’t discern much of an ideological difference between those two charming gentlemen.
John McDonnell I’m afraid is fighting a losing battle in the Labour Party. Over at Socialist Unity, Andy Newman has branded him ‘ultra-left’ for breaking with some of his former supporters in the Compass group due to their support for 42 day detention. I think McDonnell is right to distance himself from such people, despite the consequences for any future leadership bid.
It does underline the paucity of genuine leftists in the Labour Party though, mainly because of the disgust many feel towards what it has done. It may be a hard slog, but building a genuine working class alternative is the only game in town now.
His dad had principles.
It might be stating the obvious, but to the New Labour lot winning the election comes a very distant second place to ingratiating themselves with international capital, and so securing themselves lucrative after-parliament jobs. The Labour party is over.
We’re in deep shit. The country is bankrupt; the oil is gone; we scarcely make or grow anything. And, as to people power, we’re further away from it than we were 100 years ago – all our organisations are corrupted and infiltrated, and the capitalist class are much better prepared.
Anyway, I agree that John McDonnell is right to distance himself from the Compass group – the history of the Labour party (and the Soviet Union) should show us that once you start compromising then you keep compromising until you’ve compromised yourself out of existence. John McDonnell is Ok; I wish him well, but wishing is all it’s likely to amount to.
Ooh,you’re in the Independent blog quoting section today Dave.
If Boy Miliband’s article in the Guardian was an attack on the Broon; then it was more like being tapped on the head by a soft toy (or, as my late pal Al Richardson would put it, like ‘being savaged by a herbacious border’). It was more an endorsement of New Labour with some very minor caveats.
The fact that this utterly damp squib is being written up as a challenge for the party leadership shows how banal mainstream politics have become today.