So Ed Milliband is now the anointed leader of the Labour Party. Are the downtrodden pouring out of their tenements onto the streets uttering cries of hope? Are they forming their battalions to advance on the Coalition’s Bastille, ready to tear it down brick by brick with their bare and bleeding hands? Are Cameron and Clegg cowering in the cellars of Downing Street quivering with fear?
Well…actually no to all of that. Hardly anyone outside the Westminster hothouse has a clue about Ed Milliband or his brother – and even to we political junkies there is something extremely plastic about them both. As for Cameron and Clegg they are probably still roaring with laughter and slapping each other on the back in joyous disbelief at the handful of aces dealt to them by the Labour Party.
Ed Milliband (age 41) is the son of a pompous and highly opinionated Marxist academic called Ralph Milliband who scuttled around the corridors of several universities during the 60s and 70s. Many of his colleagues and students appeared to be immensely relieved whenever he left a post apart from a handful of left wing fellow travellers who had an inflated view of their own and his importance – hence the myth of Ralph Milliband as a giant of the left and the scourge of the British establishment. In fact he was an insignificant pipsqueak who had little, if any, contact with the working class he claimed to represent, living as he did in bourgeois comfort in a fashionable Guardian reading enclave of North London.
Ed was apparently a bright boy, won a good degree and, after a brief flirtation with television journalism got a job as a Labour Party researcher in 1993 and, in the following year, gained an attachment to Gordon Brown’s political staff. Finally in 2005 he was shoehorned by Brown into a safe Labour seat and, within a year or so became a government minister, ending up, in 2008, as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate change, becoming a major player at the 2009 Copenhagen Conference.
So Ed Milliband, after just five years in Parliament is now the elected leader of the Labour Party – with almost zero experience of the world outside politics. But that matters not a jot to the comrades who have no wish to understand the workings of wealth creation. The keys to his success came from the support of the trade unions, which form a powerful bloc in the process of electing the leader, and the influence of Gordon Brown and his followers who, despite being responsible for Labour’s loss of power in the recent election, still exist as a significant force in Labour politics.
The Trade Unionists and the Brownites claim that Ed Milliband is the right man for the task of crushing the Cameron/Clegg coalition and restoring Labour to power. In fact their true priority is to airbrush Tony Blair and the concept of New Labour from the rulebook and return the party to the left – totally ignoring the lessons of Blair’s electoral victories of ’97, ‘01 and ’05 which were based on attracting middle class votes by ignoring the unions and embracing the capitalist ethic.
Blair, of course, was a wonderful conman in the Clinton mould, managing to give the impression of doing much but achieving very little yet using his charm and charisma to disarm his critics. Milliband is as charismatic as a roll of felt. He had a reputation amongst government colleagues for being indecisive and preferring to posture rather than implementing policy – no wonder given his boyhood experiences at home, listening to Ralph and his cronies pontificate about the restructuring of society when none of them had any experience of having to manage real organisations that impacted on the real world.
Milliband is the plenipotentiary of the Guardian reading chattering classes whose main interests are climate change, civil liberties and the belief that the main function of government is to provide therapy – just the sort of man the UK does not need in a world that will face up to a decade of zero economic growth and the machinations of evil fanatics who wish to sentence us to a lifetime of helotry under the rule of medieval cultists.
One might well argue, however, that his four rivals for the leadership were equally uninspiring and there would be much truth in that. Strangely enough, however, there was one important political figure from the Brown regime who the Tories always feared – Alan Johnson, the former Home Secretary.
Johnson, a postman who rose to be leader of the postal workers union was a man far removed from the world of the Millibands. Articulate, bright and with a cockney accent highlighting his humble background, he could have proved a perfect foil to David Cameron, the wealthy Old Etonian. But Johnson was too right wing for his former union comrades and, at the age of 60, regarded as a tad too old by the spinmeisters and PR gurus who appear to exert such an influence on political life.
Blair has always been worried that the Labour left was never too interested in finding the needle in the haystack that symbolised holding power – they instead preferred to scramble in the hay, quarrelling over arcane disputes and bearing long held grudges. By electing this nonentity it appears his fears were fully justified…
The Coalition, committed as it is to the reduction of the deficit, will face a bumpy ride as it implements the spending cuts essential to the revival of a sound economy. But Labour’s leftward drift under Milliband will provoke a reaction from the heirs of Tony Blair – there will be plots and fights and blood on the benches weakening the image of the party as a viable alternative government. It doesn’t mean that the Coalition is definitelyhome and dry at the next election – but the ascension of Ed certainly shortens the odds for that eventuality.
