ANALYSIS: The long campaign for leadership of the British Labour Party is entering the home stretch - and whoever wins will know the coalition could become vulnerable, writes MARK HENNESSY
FORMER CHANCELLOR of the exchequer Alistair Darling could be seen on Monday heading back to his office in the House of Commons with a sandwich in hand – trying, with difficulty, to hold two precariously balanced coffees.
The image could be used to illustrate Labour’s own difficulties, as it seeks to discover what it should, can, or wants to hold on to from the days of New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Some spillages are inevitable.
For months, the five candidates vying to replace Brown have travelled long and hard for hustings in front of Labour supporters – though, in truth, the odyssey has rarely if ever engaged the public at large.
Nor has it offered much clarity about what Labour should do to ensure that it is not left out of power for a generation, as it was after the party exited office in 1979 in the face of the Margaret Thatcher onslaught.
It is a battle between two brothers, David and Ed Miliband, with the other three candidates – Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott – more often making up the numbers, though their second and later preferences will decide the outcome.
Somewhat simplistically, the brothers’ battle has offered scope to present the contest as Cain versus Abel – with the underlying message that Labour is doomed to repeat the internecine warfare that marked the Blair-Brown years.
Perhaps that will happen, though that is surely as much dependent upon what happens to the Conservative-Liberal Democrat alliance as it seeks to impose near-unprecedented spending cuts in coming months and years.
Equally simplistically, the situation has been presented as one Miliband (David) wanting to keep the party in the centre-ground, with the younger brother (Ed) wanting to take the party sharply leftwards to stake out Labour’s traditionally held place on the political spectrum.
The simplification works to the extent that it covers their attitudes to New Labour: David is determined not to forget the achievements of its 13 years in office, while Ed wishes to leave that memory behind. Beyond that, the simplification ceases to work.
Both have talked about the need for higher taxes, though the younger Miliband has done so more often and with greater passion, while David has given the impression at times that he has done so because it is a message that Labour supporters want to hear.
David Miliband has had to be the most careful in his choice of words because he is the one most likely to win, and therefore does not want to offer early hostages to fortune that could imperil his subsequent ability to land blows on prime minister David Cameron if the two find themselves head-to-head at the despatch box for prime minister’s questions.
His brother has been able to take greater risks because for now his target is the limited electorate in the Labour race: 40 per cent of the vote is held by the rank-and-file membership, 30 per cent by the trades unions who are balloting their own members, with the rest is in the hands of the much-smaller Labour parliamentary party now occupying the House of Commons benches.
The elder Miliband has opted to stick with the spending plans left by Alistair Darling, which would reduce the UK’s deficit more slowly than is proposed by his Conservative successor, George Osborne, and require a greater willingness to delay dealing with the problem than has been decided by the new government.
However, even Darling’s plans would have required an extra £18 billion (€21.6 billion) a year in taxes by 2014-15 to keep his mathematics afloat.
Given the need to offer some of his own red-toothed attacks on the richer elements of society, Miliband the Elder has backed imposing a so-called “mansion tax” on larger homes and stopping VAT exemptions enjoyed by private schools, rather than the VAT increase to come into force next year, as chosen by Osborne in one of his early decisions in the treasury.
Politically, the dangers for Labour of all this talk about tax are obvious: to be meaningful, tax increases must affect not just the rich, but those with aspirations to be richer than they are, particularly in England, where Labour must make gains if it is to win back power – gains that could be all the harder to achieve if the Conservative-Liberal Democrat plans to redraw constituencies were to come about.
Ed Miliband, meanwhile, has been the more articulate during Labour’s hustings, with an ability to get the crowds going that his brother does not have.
Miliband the Younger, though, has been the one to look rabbit-eyed and indecisive during interviews when harder questions have been posed.
In power, Labour, with its seemingly never-ending cycle of legislation, particularly on civil liberties and target-setting for all elements of British life, attracted a deserved reputation among the public for being an administration bent on total control, jeopardising the party’s long-held position on human rights and, bizarrely, allowing the Conservatives to portray themselves as more liberal.
Crime, however, offers opportunities for Labour, particularly if justice secretary Ken Clarke’s plan to cut the numbers going to jail fails to deal with the reality of crime – levels of which are likely to worsen if past experience in economic tough times is repeated – or if Clarke’s plans fail to deal with people’s perception of crime, which is politically always the more significant factor.
The strategies of both Milibands, however, have merits in different ways: David Miliband insists that Labour must maintain the broad coalition of interests that served New Labour well for so long, even if those interests have changed and morphed over the years.
Meanwhile, his brother argues that Labour lost out most heavily with those who would once have been seen as the party’s bedrock. Both are right, but the younger Miliband will be easier for the Conservatives to caricature.
Ironically, though, the candidate who has run the clearest campaign is the one who will not win: Ed Balls, once Gordon Brown’s closest ally, and often his henchman, who has savaged the Conservatives over the summer on an issue that affects hundreds of thousands of parents: the government’s decision to abandon an admittedly unfunded Labour plan to build new schools and repair old ones.
Furthermore, he has argued that even Alistair Darling’s deficit-cutting plans were too drastic: proposing, instead, a much longer timeframe, higher taxes on those earning £100,000 a year and a stimulus package to keep the British economy from tipping into the feared “double-dip” recession. It may not be right, or even sensible, but it is clear.
Ironically, the calls for higher taxes made to different degrees by the five candidates may in time prove prescient, since George Osborne is bidding to cut four pounds of spending for every new pound raised in tax. Such a ratio has only been achieved rarely elsewhere and never in the UK, and many – particularly some in the treasury – doubt that it can be done in coming years.
Labour may yet find itself facing a government that brutally cuts spending and yet still has to increase taxation sharply. For any opposition party – even one unsure, perhaps, of where it should go next – such an outcome would be the perfect storm: a storm which they would have to navigate badly not to profit from. The man (for it will be a man) elected by Labour can take the crown with his eyes on the prize of 10 Downing Street.
Mark Hennessy is London Editor