What is Ed Miliband’s elevator pitch?

Posted on Friday 13 January, 2012
Filed Under Labour Party

 


THERE is no alternative. It’s the economy, stupid. Third Way. Big Society. Encapsulate your outlook into a pithy slogan of as few words as possible, or risk having someone encapsulate it for you.

That these designations are typically vacuous and point to little of substance matters not. Fail to play the game, and posterity will forever associate you with traffic cones hotlines.

Yet Ed Miliband – raised in a household where the finer points of political sociology will presumably have been routine conversation over the cornflakes – has yet to offer us a boiled-down manifesto.

The result is that even those of us who are well disposed towards the Labour leader remain at a loss to define his message.

Yes, I am glad to see someone in the top job who does not treat trade unions in the same way as US Marines treat the corpses of captured Taliban combatants, and who is even ready to appear on a TUC platform.

But for Miliband simply to define himself as standing for ‘fairness’ in the abstract is not enough. It is not as if any politician of any stripe stands up and openly features iniquity, malfeasance, discrimination, injustice and horsewhipping small children as central to their programme.

And worthy as it is to demand that grannies should be on the lowest available dual fuel tariff, as visions of the future good society go, this is hardly up there with ‘I have a dream’ in the inspirational rhetoric stakes.

The result is that Miliband leaves himself open to sniper fire from both directions. The Tories would slag him off whatever he did, of course. But his continuing lack of clarity gives Blairites and Blue Labour the opportunity constantly to repeat charges of strategic drift and lack of narrative, and the cumulative effect is damaging.

A credible elevator pitch would at once disarm the critics and give Labour Party members something to sell on the doorstep. How hard can it be, Ed?


<<Go back

Comments

72 Responses to “What is Ed Miliband’s elevator pitch?”

  1. Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
    on January 17th, 2012 at 14:19

    look — the secret life of Moany Sundial age 7 and 3/4

    http://www.pickledpolitics.com/archives/2081

    so cool!
    “here is a pictua of my shiny new bike — my mummy says i am only allowed to ride it if i keep the stabilizers on”

  3. Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
    on January 17th, 2012 at 14:21

    hashkeY ##### Moandial is trendinG on Twiotter

    @3@™™±^^ ^∞∞∞¶¶™™¡≠≠≠––ººªªªª•••¶¶§§∞∞¢¢¢¢£££##@@ is trending on TwiTTEr DeckIng.

  4. Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
    on January 17th, 2012 at 14:27

    i didn’t get where i am today by pissing about on the internet on blerghhs talking truth abowt sunny hundal

  5. Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
    on January 17th, 2012 at 15:06

    PS Moany Sundial — he ‘did’ an economics degree.

    Hahahahahahahahahah!!!

  6. Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
    on January 17th, 2012 at 15:11

    Sunny Hundal has been working with online communities for ten years, and has a very hands-on attitude to discussion threads. On his liberalconspiracy blog, he hardly ever has to delete comments, and credits that to building a culture of dignified discussion and debate.

    Hundal gives aggressive commenters very short shrift, and was also quite hard on CiF, saying a culture has been established “where people can just swear at each other”. If he has aggressive or stupid commenter, he will tell them so. And if they don’t like their comments being deleted, he tells them to go and start their own blog.”

    wow. what a radical.

    cahrlie brooker can fuck off s wekll
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2008/jun/17/futureofjournalismiscomme

  7. Jimmy Glesga
    on January 17th, 2012 at 20:13

    Roger. I thought Walker was a retired colonel. He was stirring it up at the same time as the NF.

  8. Pinkie
    on January 17th, 2012 at 21:34

    Actually, I know that I could easily find out what an ‘elevator pitch’ is, Google and all that.

    Paradoxically, an article talking about a lack of a brief immediately understandable point of view demanded that there had to be a reference out to clarify what was meant.

    Not much of an ‘elevator pitch’, David, or is there something different about blog articles?

  9. boleyn ali
    on January 17th, 2012 at 22:35

    For Hundal being on that panel means he has finally arrived. Perhaps now he can fuck back off again.

  10. boleyn ali
    on January 17th, 2012 at 22:40

    Shit he was just on Newsnight too, talking about his current flag of convenience the Labour Party.

  11. Martin
    on January 18th, 2012 at 00:30

    When they came calling I used to tell the Tories to just piss off, whilst I quitely just shut door in the face of Labour hacks.

    These days I still do the same to the Tories, but take special care now to shove the Labour hacks head up his own rectum.

    David, if you have not by now got Millibands ‘elevator pitch’(he has one), most especially after this last weekend, I suggest you need to move on from wishing for fecking Narnia.

    McClusky has it right. We are given no legitimate voice whatsoever. As I have said countless times here. We live in a one party state. Politics is for them. If we voice opinion it’s trouble and backstabbing. Though that does generously assume they have a spine still to stab.(Jimmy)

    What really still does my head in is we purportedly have people here who know their Marx from cover to cover, yet still expect this laughingly called ‘Social Democracy’ to deliver our alternative, if only we have enough begging bowls. Bleedin hell! Marx saw through traitors like Milliband and Balls 150 years ago.

    Tragically and very soon the only buggers left it seems who will be confident in their argument and cause are the terminally ill people this day being found fit for work.

    Stop all funding to labour. Then crucify the bastards on the road to get Cameron.

  12. modernity's ghost
    on January 18th, 2012 at 00:35

    I suppose, **if** the current crop of lacklustre nobodies that run the LP had been around when the Tories were saying

    “Let’s put more kids up chimneys, it is good for profit”

    that Ed Miliband & co would have replied:

    “Labour understand the economic imperative and is not against sending children up chimmeys, but is concerned at the pace of it”

    My bet is that Ed Balls might have ventured:

    “I am for shoving kids up chimneys, but there aren’t enough of them to go around, Labour pledges to increase chimney building when we come into power.”

  13. Jimmy Glesga
    on January 18th, 2012 at 02:20

    More chimneys and opening the coal mines are required. Don’t go down the mine today dad the bunkers full of coal. One of your better rants Martin but no proposals that will win over the voter.

  14. LesAbbey
    on January 18th, 2012 at 03:31

    Or are we all just playing some Labour spin-doctor’s game. Remember not that long ago Tom Baldwin ‘instructed’ the Labour front bench not to mention the BSkyB deal while talking about phone hacking.

    This has the smell of one of these marketing gurus saying we can undercut the Tory attack on the Eds by showing how they are not ‘spend and tax’ monsters the media is making them out to be. That then some union leaders join in the attack is probably looked upon as a positive by these people.

    The problem isn’t what is being said, it is in playing the game. The Labour leadership is following the story line that both the Tories and the Blairites want it to follow. The alternative was to start proposing policies which change the argument. It shouldn’t be about how much money there is to spend, but about how what money there is available is divided. It’s about turning back the changes in the mixed economy that have been implemented since the Regan/Thatcher economic policies. It should be about income equality (the GINI coefficient) and the use of income tax policies to make a fairer society. Why for instance has the top rate of tax declined so much since the 1970s? It should be about what tools we could use to reward and punish ‘productive and predatory’ companies. How about using corporate tax rates to do this?

    And yes let’s see if we can do better by allowing the workers to decide how jobs and pay are balanced. Let councils go to their workers and say this is how much money we have so what should we do. Let workers councils be part of the decision making process. Better this than some six-figured salary council executive deciding by himself.

    We should be talking about empowering the citizens of Britain. It’s not just council workers, it’s parents at schools that don’t want to be made academies, it’s postal workers that don’t want to become temp workers for TNT or Tesco checkout workers replaced by automatic tills. Sometime in the future we should be able to look forward to lower working week hours and an earlier retirement age. This is what technology promised us in the 1960s. That it hasn’t happened is the result of those neo-liberal economic policies.

    Anyone born since the sixties has been cheated out of their birthright by both the Tory and New Labour governments.

  15. KEVIN
    on January 18th, 2012 at 12:12

    It shows the clear need for a new working class democratic socialist party in this country. Labour has been under big business control for some years now

  16. Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
    on January 18th, 2012 at 13:01

    wowee – Kevin has left a cooment – “Labour has been under big business control for some years now”.

    gawdds troof

  17. Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
    on January 18th, 2012 at 13:02

    i repeat Ostler – you shud be ashamed of youself.

  18. Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
    on January 18th, 2012 at 13:38

    wot is the verdict on food here?

    I mean – absolutely necessary or just an indulgence?

  19. Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
    on January 18th, 2012 at 13:39

    this much i k now – gravy is bougoiurwarr

  20. Monsuer Jelly est Formidable
    on January 18th, 2012 at 13:41

    every last one of the sidebar links from here are to blerhhgs that are links to cunernts. everylast one. without exception.

  21. Jer
    on January 18th, 2012 at 14:03

    Mr Jelly

    Psychic Bob answers your question, providing you are Saggitarius.

    If Dave is Aries then he’s 100%. Spooky.

  22. Chris
    on January 19th, 2012 at 23:14

    Here’s an elevator pitch Labour should use:

    Nationalise the commanding heights to bring the economy under state control.
    Break up the media groups.
    Overturn all anti-union laws.
    Abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords.
    Nationalise private schools.
    80% top rate of tax.

« Older Comments

Leave a Reply