The Independent newspaper’s Bank Holiday edition gives blanket coverage to Ed Miliband’s Labour leadership campaign.
This is not the place to discuss Ed Miliband’s pitch to the core Labour membership, nor even to wonder why the Indy is giving so much space to this particular candidate. What is worth looking at is his contention that Labour, under him, would appeal to Liberal Democrat voters.
Political editor Andrew Grice quotes him as offering “a home to former Liberal Democrats and bring together a social democratic economic policy, redistribution, greater equality and putting individual liberty at the centre of who we are.”
“Why is he so well qualified?,” asks Grice: “Because I share the Liberal Democrats’ agenda on civil liberties, ID cards, the detention of terrorist suspects without charge and university tuition fees,” replies Miliband. “The Liberal Democrats are on a journey. Clegg is taking them in a direction a lot of Lib Dem supporters are deeply dismayed about. I offer a home for Liberal Democrat voters in which they don’t have to trade abolition of ID cards for a reactionary assault on the welfare state, and they can be true to their values on both civil liberties and economic policy.”
Note that there is no appeal to Liberal Democrat members to join the Labour Party. The average Liberal Democrat would not be welcomed by the average member of the Labour Party, which has a different ethos. Moreover, a defector would soon be put off by the “spin, triangulation and internecine warfare” identified by Diane Abbott in an interview with Ed Stourton on Radio 4.
Nor would Ed Miliband’s pitch work currently. We already lost most of our waverers at the last general election, scared by the press campaign against the dangers of a coalition. If anything, we would gain votes if there were to be another general election soon, as those doubters would have been reassured by the solidity of the coalition and would return.
No, Ed Miliband is relying on short memories. Now, we can ask where he was between 1997 and 2009 when Blair and Brown were pushing their agenda “on civil liberties, ID cards, the detention of terrorist suspects without charge and university tuition fees”, not to mention the invasion of Iraq, the refusal to restore the earnings link to state pensions and the encouragement of “build now, pay over the odds later” PFI schemes in English education and health. In five years time, we will have to remind voters of these things, as well as pointing out that, under Labour, we will never have real voting reform, proper engagement with the EU nor a serious look at our “independent” nuclear deterrent.
Frank Little is a Liberal Democrat member of Neath Port Talbot council and blogs at ffranc sais
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