Maurice Glasman has given some advice to Ed Miliband: Nothing wrong with that. He has put this advice in the New Statesman and that's fine too. He has also added that he is backing Ed Miliband: Great. All of this will be missed. What is on the news and what will be in the papers are the following nuggets:
"There seems to be no strategy, no narrative and little energy... He has not broken through... He has flickered rather than shone, nudged not led.... Ed has honoured his responsibilities but has not exerted his power."
It is true that Ed is not the most showy of leaders, and sometimes it is better to provide constant lumination than shine brightly like a star and then implode. As for a lack of strategy, I don’t agree that this is the case. Opposition is very different from government in that the opposition has the luxury, at least early on in the five year life of a government, to be able to engage with Labour supporters and the public. There will be a time when the policies needed for government will be formed. Now is a time when policies must be concerned with damage limitation, particularly in the NHS and Education, where the Tories seem intent in transforming the landscape to suit their own interests, with a complete disregard for the most vulnerable in society.
There are different ways to exert power. One is to be arrogant enough to think, "I know I am right" and force the agenda. Another way of exerting power is to listen to people from all sides of the Party including those on the right like Glasman and then decide what is best for the Party and the for the future of Britain. There are different ways of getting things done, you can shout "I have decided we are doing this" and tell the press before you tell Parliament (the speaker quite rightly has picked up on this recently) or you can make a decision based on what you have heard and tell competent trusted colleagues who will implement what has been decided. Power can be exerted in more than one way.
Glasman has been unduly harsh to write in public that there is "no strategy, no narrative and little energy". If he wants to give some ideas to the leader and the shadow cabinet then I'm sure that he has access to them. Debate is good, it is how we form policy and make progress. Differences of opinion are good, they allow many views to be heard and taken in to account. But there is a fine line between discussion and open criticism that harms the Party. If a Labour activist wants to be in the newspaper then there is an easy way to do it: Just say that Ed is dreadful and someone will print what you have to say. Supportive articles are written on blogs but are not really news.
I think that Ed should be given time; he may well grow into his position. The Labour Leader should be given more time than the average football manager. It seems that some Party members think the two positions are similar. In the premiership after a few bad games the pressure mounts. In the Labour Party a few bad headlines and there is a leadership crisis. After the Labour-led phone hacking enquiry good headlines are as hard to to come by as wins in football matches in the most competitive league in the world.
I think that Ed should be given time; he may well grow into his position. The Labour Leader should be given more time than the average football manager. It seems that some Party members think the two positions are similar. In the premiership after a few bad games the pressure mounts. In the Labour Party a few bad headlines and there is a leadership crisis. After the Labour-led phone hacking enquiry good headlines are as hard to to come by as wins in football matches in the most competitive league in the world.
The Tories are the real enemy and now is the time to give a united voice in support of Ed Miliband and direct our energy to trying to make sure this coalition is a one term government.
1 comment:
The staggeringly mendacious coverage of Maurice Glasman's New Statesman article leaves no remaining room for doubt that the media are planning a coup against the Leader who has taken Labour to a poll lead most of the time and to five consecutive by-election wins, all with comfortable swings against the Conservatives, on the basis of openness to working-class, rural, provincial, patriotic, socially conservative and other profoundly unfashionable concerns bound up with the utterly non-Marxist roots of the real Labour tradition: trade union, co-operative and mutual, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and so on.
Maurice is treated like this, and even he does not have a regular spot anywhere. Nor can any room be found for Stewart Wood, Stuart White, Marc Stears, Jonathan Rutherford, Jon Cruddas, Allegra Stratton, Rowenna Davis, Carole Stone, Duncan Weldon, Paul Bickley, Neil Jameson, Blair McDougall, Luke Bretherton, Jonathan Cox, Anthony Painter, Patrick Diamond, and many more besides. For Dan Hodges, as nothing more than a two-fingered salute directed at the New Statesman. But not for any of those. Neil Clark articulates the concerns of Mail and Telegraph readers about the railways or about cuts to library services, for example. But his only regular outlet for doing so in the Morning Star.
The traditional Catholic Labourism of Martin Meenagh, Ann Farmer, Paul Priest or the blogger under the name of Red Maria is excluded both from the left-wing media and from the Catholic media, since in this country the only people permitted to present themselves as orthodox Catholics are those who, after the manner of Rick Santorum, have mistaken neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy for the Faith. The task of certifying the same has been arrogated by and to a man of that mind with domestic and recreational arrangements no less far removed from those which one might expect.
The provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, monarchist, pro-Commonwealth, mind-our-own-business opponents of European federalism, American hegemony and kowtowing to Israel ought to have withdrawn from the Conservative Party when the metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian, “republican”, anti-Commonwealth, make-the-world-anew supporters of European federalism, American hegemony and kowtowing to Israel removed Iain Duncan Smith for having taken his party to parity and beyond in the opinion polls, for having made it the largest party in local government, and for having threatened to turn the 2005 General Election into a proper contest.
If Rupert Murdoch and the BBC repeat that trick against Ed Miliband, then that same mistake must not be made by Maurice Glasman, Stewart Wood, Stuart White, Marc Stears, Jonathan Rutherford, Jon Cruddas, Allegra Stratton, Rowenna Davis, Carole Stone, Duncan Weldon, Paul Bickley, Neil Jameson, Blair McDougall, Luke Bretherton, Jonathan Cox, Anthony Painter, Patrick Diamond, Neil Clark, Martin Meenagh, Ann Farmer, Paul Priest or the blogger under the name of Red Maria, among many, many, many others. There is a world elsewhere.
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