Ed Miliband's blank piece of paper

[smithdown]

Ed Miliband's famous blank piece of paper, Labour's policy prospectus, will start to be coloured in this weekend when the party's policy forum meets on Saturday in Wrexham, north Wales. The aim will be to start to achieve something no opposition party has managed in the past 30 years – to bounce back to power in just one term.

 

That goal has led Labour's leaders to decide that they need to act with more haste than previously thought. The concept of a leisurely, disordered, policy review, if ever true, is being disowned. The era of low-risk leadership is about to end with some bolder strokes on policy, personnel and party reform.

 

Lessons are being drawn from a slew of books on the Tories in opposition. Tim Bale's Conservative Party: Thatcher to Cameron, has reminded Labour of how it took the Tories an extraordinary five years from the loss of power under John Major to the admission that it was perceived as the selfish, nasty, party.

 

Peter Snowdon's Back from the Brink is another guide to how slow parties can be to respond to crises in public perception. By contrast Labour has rushed to admit error.

 

But Labour is also subtly reworking the policy review process. Figures such as the policy review co-ordinator, Liam Byrne, would probably admit that the hydra-headed reviews, set up November in a largely ad hoc way, lacked coherence. No fewer than 19 reviews were announced, on what seemed a random basis. The advantage was that it gave every shadow cabinet member something to do. But it hardly provided the over-arching narrative that Lord Mandelson, a veteran of policy reviews under Neil Kinnock, ssaid the party needed in his Progress speech this week.

 

The foreign policy review by Douglas Alexander seems only to be looking at Brazil, Russia, India and China, an important but hardly sufficient foreign policy theme. No exploration of Labour's increasingly questioned pro-Europeanism is being attempted. By contrast, Harriet Harman, the shadow international development secretary, has appointed six sub-reviews.

 

There is as yet no separate economic policy review but instead previously announced reviews, on issues such as low pay and welfare, that will feed into an economic policy review co-ordinated by the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls.

 

To try to bring some order to the process the policy reviews have all now been rearranged under four sub-heads – rebuilding the economy to help the squeezed middle, keeping the promise for the next generation, renewing responsibility, and our place in the world. Some groups have met six or so times, drawing in as many outside experts as an unfashionable party four years from power can gather.

 

Progress is uneven. The shadow transport secretary, Maria Eagle, currently in Amsterdam looking at the Dutch tram system, pretty well knows her policy destination – free travel for young people, reintegration of the mainline rail system, buses made a priority over trains, and devolved power to regional transport authorities. Other policy groups seem not have gone beyond clearing the undergrowth.

 

Byrne argues the starting point is understanding why the public rejected Labour. In a speech on Wednesday he said: "If we want to win back the people's trust to lead again, we have to understand how the public see us and why. Therein starts the business of renewal. This is perhaps the first great lesson from oppositions which stay in opposition for a long time. Oppositions that stay in opposition are the parties that fail to confront and take on the weaknesses the public see in them."

 

While this was true of the Tories after 1997, Labour after 1979 was not much better. "It was an incredible eight years before Kinnock embarked on a major exercise of his own – talking to the public about the way they saw things. This is not a mistake we are going to repeat," Byrne says.

 

The aim this weekend is to provide some signposts to something more specific at the autumn party conference, including something close to definitive on a replacement for tuition fees.

 

On the squeezed middle, Miliband thinks the central ground of politics has shifted from public service reform to a rebalanced economy, an issue belatedly addressed by Mandelson, now taken up by the shadow business secretary, John Denham. Critical are the issues of child and social care, which can constrain the amount of time people can work.

 

Miliband's second chosen theme is the promise of Britain – the contract that the next generation should fare as well as the current adult generation. Miliband can offer optimism, with answers on education, transport and housing, ingredients he is convinced can win him the election – and something the Tories, with the emphasis on the deficit, cannot offer.

 

Byrne says the Tories returned to power after only a term in opposition precisely because Thatcher engaged in an argument about what her party was for. Miliband has to be equally clear.

 

The review's final leg will be responsibility, in the benefit queue and in the boardroom. The party is going to try to renew social insurance, and try to leapfrog the Tories on welfare.

 

None of this answers the pressing question of the deficit, Labour's dire polling on economic competence, or Miliband's own personal ratings.

 

Last week Balls alarmed some by almost admitting he had bet the whole farm on George Osborne's cuts seriously killing growth. It may take two years for him to know if he or the chancellor of the exchequer is right. It is likely that later in the parliament Balls will set out the basic financial disciplines that will govern spending under a Labour government. He will retain the Office for Budget Responsibility that can warn if Labour is about to set off on an unsustainable spending spree.

 

There is also dark talk of a mechanism to address waste in public spending. An inquiry could be set up on the issue.

 

Miliband is trying something rare – shifting the centre of politics to the left from the position of opposition rather than from government. By next year he may remember what the former Australian leader John Howard said to William Hague: "You know, William, there's only one thing harder than the first year in opposition … it's the second."

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/22/labour-policy-reviews

 

He's no Kenny, is he?

 

If you had his ear, what would you tell him?

[Spion kop]

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[muleskinner]

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[johngibo YPC]

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[Spion kop]

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Edited June 23, 2011 by Spion kop

[Sion]

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