Labour's Blame Game



Philip Collins doesn't hold back in this damning assessment of Ed Miliband's five year spell as Labour leader in which he bet the house on his belief that politics had shifted 'left' following the great economic crash of 2008.

Unite's Len McCluskey also gets both barrels, deservedly so in my opinion, because having played a crucial role in installing Ed Miliband as Labour leader (by overturning the will of individual party members), Len McCluskey now feels no shame in calling for the resignation of the Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy, who was elected by a big majority of Labour party members in Scotland only six months ago.

So Len McCluskey washes his hands of any responsibility for the mess left behind by Ed Miliband's period as leader while trying to make Jim Murphy the fall-guy for all that's happened in Scotland, presumably including Ed Miliband's personal poll ratings which were significantly worse than David Cameron's.

Now Labour's in a real mess at the moment and most of their problems are self-inflicted, but that's no excuse for allowing bully-boy union leaders with fat cheque books to decide who's running the office, not even the Scottish branch office.

Am I angry at vain, arrogant Ed? Hell, yes

By Philip Collins - The Times


Despite the scale of Labour’s defeat, siren voices blaming it on the media or lazy supporters are in full cry. What idiots

To anyone who has lost someone cherished, the cycle of grief will be familiar. After the numbing shock comes the denial of reality. The intrusion of the terrible truth incites anger before despair sets in. Only then, when terms have been found for the loss, can recovery begin. The Labour party is about to try the full cycle by September 12 when its new leader will be announced. A choice beckons and any hope in 2020 is at issue. Time to grow up.

Already, the cavalry of denial is marshalling its forces. If it’s not the Murdoch press who were biased, it was the BBC. The “lazy” left-wingers didn’t turn out because they were insufficiently enthused. Scotland proves that opposing austerity works. The message on inequality just needs more sophisticated crafting. If only the same left-wing bromides were spoken in a northern accent or by a woman, it would all magically fall our way. Every variety of rubbish, brought to you by the politicians and commentators who failed to foresee the disaster.

They walked into a catastrophe of epic proportions. Even if Labour had held all its Scottish seats it would have won only one more seat than Neil Kinnock managed in 1992. In southern England, apart from London, Labour took one seat from the Tories and lost a further eight. Towns that Labour won in 1997, such as Watford and Chatham, are now impregnably Tory. Labour began Thursday night needing a swing of 5.3 per cent and ended it needing 8.75 per cent. To win a majority of 10 in 2020, Labour will have to unseat Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford, a place that has never had a Labour MP.

To deny such a flood is difficult but Labour will be tempted to try. The first meeting of the parliamentary Labour party was treated to stirring anti-Tory invective by Harriet Harman. Indeed, denial already has its two candidates in the field. To judge from their declaration statements neither Andy Burnham nor Yvette Cooper have the first idea why they lost. Ms Cooper’s article in The Mirror was a platitudinous, intern-drafted press release for the Pontefract and Castleford Express. They liked a lot of what we had to say, she said, blithely. I hate to point this out, but they really didn’t.

Mr Burnham released a video in which he claimed that “our challenge is to rediscover the beating heart of Labour”. After an election campaign consisting of Mr Burnham close to tears about how much he loves the NHS, a beating heart is, I suppose, preferable to a bleeding heart. But this isn’t analysis; it’s therapy. “The party I love,” Mr Burnham goes on, “has lost its emotional connection with millions of people.” Normal people, in the normal world, have emotional attachments to their families not the Labour party. This is an audition to be prime minister, not a trailer for The X Factor. I don’t mind that Mr Burnham is Len McCluskey’s candidate but it really worries me that he might be George Osborne’s.

However, now he has raised his head, there is the small matter of Mr McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, whose loyalty to Labour is so unbounded that in March he threatened to disaffiliate Unite from the party. Frankly Len, if that’s your attitude, thank you and good night. In any case, whether you stay to stuff envelopes in the leadership election or not, the rest of us are at least entitled to a period of silence. What more do you want, Len? You got your party back. You got the leader you wanted. You got the anti-business baby-talk you believe in. You got the job lot and it was a total, unbridled, unhindered fiasco. So belt up and leave the politics to people who know what they’re doing.

If that sounds like it comes more from anger than sorrow, that’s because there is neither denial nor shock in my cycle of grief. However, it does have to be said that, ultimately, this is not Len McCluskey’s mess. We should at least direct the rage at the right part of the machine. I do find the weasel words of James Morris, the Labour party pollster who devised a disastrous electoral strategy, contemptible. When Mr Morris claims he always knew Labour was doomed he is simply bidding for his reputation and his client list. I have heard for myself Mr Morris’s baroque explanations of why Mr Miliband was set for Downing Street. He was fluent in footnoted folly when it suited him.

Finally, though, these are only courtiers. The defeat debate is already a cacophony but a voice conspicuously absent from the concord is that of Ed Miliband. The former leader could do his party a service by making plain why he thinks Labour lost. It is not a perfunctory mea culpa we need. It is a recantation. Mr Miliband could say, in these exact words, “I thought the country had moved to the left. I was wrong”. The trouble is I suspect he still thinks he is right. He thinks the electorate weren’t up to it. Add false consciousness to the historic litany of Labour excuses.

Until Mr Miliband proves me wrong, it’s hard not to load both barrels and send bullets his way. Mr Miliband decided to address himself to the 2 per cent of the rich and the 8 per cent of the poor with nothing to say to the unsqueezed middle in between. Arrogantly, with conviction but no evidence, he tested his own stupid theories to his party’s destruction. Labour did not get murdered; it committed suicide. The tragedy was horribly familiar, this time in both senses of the word. The Labour party in 2015 became the victim of a ghastly atavistic dispute, the lab rat for Mr Miliband’s experiment in proving that his father, who insisted there was no parliamentary road to socialism, was right all along. The people Labour stands for need a Labour government and he left them with nothing. For vanity and for shame, Ed. So, am I angry about what he did? Hell, yes.

Political grief, though, has to discover optimism once more. At least the disaster was unarguable and all-encompassing. At least it created a space in which Tony Blair, Alan Milburn and John Hutton are allowed once again to speak. The analyses by Chuka Umunna, Liz Kendall and Tristram Hunt were pleasingly full of insight. The leader must be the one among them who performs best this summer.

So, tempting as it is to indulge the anger, the cycle has to turn. Indeed, the storm has abated, the clouds have cleared, the suffocating atmosphere has passed. The Tories might collapse over Europe; the SNP will be subject to the wear and tear of being the government; a 1997-style swing to Labour in five years’ time would give them an overall majority of 71.

Here then is the choice. To come to terms with the loss, to rise again when morning comes and life goes on. Or to give way to denial which, in due course, hardens into despair.

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