David Miliband’s piece in this morning’s
Guardian is headed:
“Against all odds we can still win, on a platform for change.” It is one of the most fascinating I have read for a long time.
The article contains little overt clue as to what Miliband wants to change. He seems happy to the point of hubris with Labour’s “achievements” and shows no sign of wishing to jettison the interventionist, high-regulating approach that has so alienated the British people from his party; on the contrary, he shows huge enthusiasm for even more intervention, yet more regulation. This is a course, Miliband declares, that will in fact empower people:
“If people and business are to take responsibility, you need government to act as a catalyst. High polluting products will not disappear unless government regulates. New nuclear power stations need planning policy to facilitate them. And if we act through the EU, we green the largest single market in the world.”
So what DOES Mr Miliband want to change? Well, he doesn’t really say. Not in so many words. There is some formulaic talk about “protection from a downturn made in Wall Street” and distributing “more power and control to citizens over the education, healthcare and social services they receive”, but he doesn’t say what he would do to achieve it.
No, most of Miliband’s article consists of a discussion of the Tories, David Cameron in particular. Cameron, he says, “is a politician of the status quo, not change”. Unlike Mr Miliband himself, no doubt. The Tories are in favour of “charity, deregulation and lower spending”, clearly anathema to Mr Miliband.
And yet Mr Miliband concedes that Cameron is “likeable and sometimes hard with disagree with”. Unlike, reads the subtext, Gordon Brown – who, significantly, receives no mention anywhere among the article’s 936 words.
Miliband’s article, though short on detail, is heavy with mood music. It is aimed over the heads of the mass of the Guardian readership and squarely at the nervous ranks of Labour backbenchers sunning themselves fitfully in Cornwall and Tuscany, much as the broadcasts of Tokyo Rose were targeted at homesick American GIs, sweltering unloved in the jungles of south-east Asia.
And, just as Rose played old, sentimental ballads, redolent with emotion, to the lovelorn doughboys, so Miliband plays the old, familiar songs he knows his readers are yearning for. Hence the talk of more regulation, windfall taxes and even the increasingly rarely carried party membership card. This is the sort of stuff Miliband knows they long to hear.
For, far from being designed to restore confidence to that febrile audience, Miliband’s piece is calculated to unsettle it still further. It is a stiletto attack of delicate but ruthless precision. The Tories have a highly persuasive, charismatic leader and could very well win, it is saying, while we are led by a man so supremely, monumentally ineffectual that I can’t even be bothered to mention his name. Brown, Molotov-like, has become a non-person.
This is not, as the Times describes it, the “first salvo in a deliberate challenge to Gordon Brown”. It is much more subtle than that.
The challenge will come later. Miliband’s article is but a step, albeit a highly significant one, in what must come first: Brown’s political assassination. Death by irrelevance.
