New leader needs to speak to the voters again

Whoever wins the Labour leadership election, one thing is very clear from today's Times/Populus poll: the public, especially Labour voters, want the new leader to follow the outward-facing approach of Tony Blair. They don't share the leadership candidates' predeliction for bashing Blairism. The poll finds that 60% of all voters and 70% of Labour voters believe that the new leader should adopt a similar approach to that adopted by Tony Blair. Of course, that doesn't mean no changes to policy: but it does mean developing policies with broad appeal and seeking to rebuild the coalition of voters that won Labour three elections.

In his first speech, the victorious Miliband would do well to follow Philip Collins's sage advice (£) in today's Times - support some government policy so that your wider critique is heard:

The new leader would be [well] advised to find an area of policy on which he intends to support the coalition — education is the obvious example — and then, in the slipstream of this concession, go in hard on Andrew Lansley’s chaotic health plans, vague Hague’s international retreat and the absence of a coalition plan for law and order.

Still the bookies' favourite

Ed Miliband may feel that he is winning the Labour leadership race, hyped by the BBC today, and boosted by last Sunday's YouGov calculations. It is interesting that the bookies don't agree, and are not placing both brothers at evens. Here are the latest odds:

Paddy Power, Coral and William Hill: David Miliband 2/5, Ed Miliband 7/4

Ladbrokes: David Miliband 4/11, Ed Miliband 15/8

We need a leader who shows Labour is back in business

It may come as no surprise that I am backing David Miliband when I cast my vote in Labour's leadership election. I have known and worked with him at various times over the last fifteen years, and while not always agreeing with him, have no doubt that he is the only one of the five candidates with the range of qualities needed not only to lead the Labour Party but to be Prime Minister. His speeches including that at the King Solomon Academy recently reflect an understanding of why we lost and how we should respond to the coalition that is frankly absent from any of his rivals.

Ed Miliband has been the surprise of this campaign, at least to me: his bizarre decision to tack leftwards reflects a lack of seriousness about the role that he seeks and a misunderstanding of how to reconnect with the voters we lost in droves in the 2010 election in constituencies like mine and across the South and South West. I have no doubt that he is often the better speaker at engaging seminar audiences than his brother, but that is not in itself a qualification for the top job. He may have attracted union endorsements and the support of the New Statesman in the process, but he has also made it far harder to win back lost voters.

Yet this has been a campaign that - fratricidal elements aside - has largely failed to ignite the attention of the public. On the one hand, that may be to the good: our support has held up well in the polls and council by-elections. But once the result is declared it is vital that the energy displayed by Tony Blair after 1994 is on display from our new leader. There must be boldness, renewal and new policy. Rather than re-running the 2005 election on Iraq, we need to prepare for an election in 2015 (or before) with a cunning and a maturity that gives people the confdidence to vote Labour again. On the evidence of recent months, David Miliband is readier to strike that balance than his opponents. But if - and, hopefully, when - he wins, he needs to redouble his efforts to show that Labour is once again back in business.

The future for free schools

The coalition's plans for free schools are given a bit more detail today. As I reported in my recent Public Finance article, there is a greater emphasis on the potential for teacher-led than parent-led schools. Otherwise, we are told that a group of 50 or so parents could club together to demand a new primary school; a larger number will be needed for a secondary (the latter are more likely to be developed by existing academy providers and secondary schools). They will be governed in a way similar to academies, and subject to Ofsted inspections, tests and tables. And the talk now is of taking over shops rather than shiny new buildings. So far, so predictable - and there was a sensible recognition this morning that some will fail, as has happened to over 600 of the 5000+ charter schools in the US .

I have no doubt that there will a number of high profile free school developments, including Toby Young's much publicised plans and those supported by some of the Teach First graduates. A more difficult group will be those parents who set up a free school simply to stymie local authority rationalisations: at a time of spending cuts, there will be some high profile battles with angry councillors. Equally, there will be plenty of difficult judgment calls when the bids from Muslim schools emerge, though it is likely that the efforts of scientologists and other cults will be stopped unless they successfully disguise their true backers.

Labour should not oppose the development of free schools, provided they are non-selective. After all, they build on an architecture developed in its education bills. The main change proposed by Michael Gove is a freeing up of planning restrictions that councils had used - with no attempt by Ed Balls to stop them doing so - to block the parental rights to demand a new school set out in the 2006 Education and Inspections Act. Instead of adopting a kneejerk defence of existing planning rules or local authorities, the next leader of the Labour party should look creatively at the model to develop imaginative new groups of free schools including in disadvantaged areas, some of which might challenge the rigid curriculum orthodoxy schizophrenically embraced by the Conservative front bench. Indeed, such imaginative thinking would be far more likely to help us win back Southern voters than talk of abolishing the charitable status of independent schools.

However, the programme's supporters are being a touch naive in their expectations about how rapidly this programme will develop. The £50 million diversity pot announced today will help some, but it will take a lot more effort than they think to develop a programme of Swedish-style or US charter school proportions. The main reason is that both systems lacked diversity before those developments. Indeed, Swedish free schools are still required to teach the national curriculum. By contrast, a huge diversity and significant autonomy has developed in our system under both Labour and Conservative governments. Not only will there be in excess of 300 academies from this autumn, there are thousands of religious schools (that don't get public funding in the US) and over 1200 foundation schools that have many of the freedoms enjoyed by academies already. Moreover, the degree of autonomy over staff and budgets enjoyed by community - local authority - school heads is far greater than in most other developed countries. Of course, there are challenges in moving our system towards the achievement levels of countries or territories with much higher degrees of ethnic homogeneity like Finland or Singapore, and Gove is right to be ambitious about improving standards, though he is wrong to underestimate how much progress has been made in recent years. But a far greater contribution to that further improvement is likely to emerge from plans for the expansion of mainstream academies, better teacher quality and strong accountability.

David Miliband's manifesto

David Miliband has today launched his bid to be Labour leader with an excellent speech that shows he understands why we lost and some of what we need to do to win again (my emphases):

We need to begin with why we lost. The essential problem was simple. In a change election we were perceived to be defending the old order. Future is the most important word in politics; but we looked out of time. Understand this, and we can rebuild. Be brutally honest about it: for too many people, we were not the people’s party that was created 100 years ago, but the politicians’ party. We were perceived by too many voters, our people, as out of touch.

So why did it happen? Because our challenge after three terms in government was renewal. We all agreed on that. Renewal in policy, renewal in culture, renewal in organisation. But we did not manage to make it real. We needed a renaissance of progressive thinking; people thought we had tried to reboot New Labour.

- On policy, we were neither proud enough of our record, humble enough about our mistakes, clear enough about our offer. We saved the NHS but it was not an issue at the election. We lost focus on education and anti social behaviour. We were playing catch up on political reform, immigration and housing. We had many policies which made sense, but they did not convince the electorate we had a coherent vision for the future of the country.

- Let’s be honest about culture too and organisation too. We did not symbolise today’s requirement for openness, participation and dialogue. We talked about new politics, late in the day admittedly, but we did not escape the image of politics as a game not a calling. We drew on our deepest strengths come the election. But an electoral machine is only replenished when it is a genuine social and political movement in the community, able to affect change. That is what many of our MPs have taught us. That is what the whole party needs to be geared to achieve.

The result is that our conversation with the public broke down. We need to restart it with our most precious asset: our idealism for a better future. Idealism is the lifeblood of our party. Not that we think we will build heaven on earth; but that we should try. And that when we create the NHS or legislate for a minimum wage or deliver free nursery education or triple overseas aid we live out our commitments to the brotherhood of man.

The beating heart of progressive values in Britain has not been stilled. In fact the other two main parties spent most of the election trying to steal them from us. What we lost was the sense that the Labour Party could be the vehicle for the implementation of those values.

So we have to put that right. Starting with this contest. Starting with one vow more important than any other: we renounce today re-fighting the battles of the past. The Blair/Brown era is over. I am not interested in politics defined as Blairite or Brownite. New Labour isn’t new any more. We learn from it; we benefit from it; we seek to emulate its successes but not repeat its mantras.

We need new ideas, and new ways of doing politics. New Labour did fantastic things for the country. But now we are out of power, what counts is next Labour. Listening, idealistic, open, engaged, thoughtful, radical, decisive, Labour. We have four tasks that we must address together.

First, we must reconnect our party, its aims, our policies, with our values and our voters. For the mum who works hard and gets tax credits but is fearful about the needles that she finds at her kids’ playground. For the dad who wants to work but whose job went when manufacturing left town. For the teenager who wants to do the right thing but has nowhere safe to go in the evening. I remember the day we committed in government to that inspiring and audacious goal of ending child poverty. It required a massive moral crusade like the Jubilee Debt campaign. Yet what should have been a pulsating movement in every community came to be seen as a technocratic exercise in Whitehall. Politics without values is not just barren; it is unsuccessful.

Second, we must renew our ideology and ideas. The best of the last 13 years is transformative. That new parents expect free nursery places and modern schools; that no political party dares to stand against tackling climate change or raising overseas aid or championing gay rights; that the NHS has been saved for future generations. The mistakes have included flinching from political reform; the lack of responsibility at the top of society; the late realisation that the green agenda is not “environmental” but in fact about economics, culture, security. I stand for individual freedom and social justice. The two traditions of progressive politics in Britain. We succeed when we make them partners, as with the National Minimum Wage or legislation on civil partnerships. We must make them partners again.

Third, we must renew our party. We won an election on May 1st 1997. Party reform stopped on May 2nd 1997. We did not become a movement in our communities rather than just an electoral machine. There is no one way to do that, but it must be done; we must try all of them. Engaging far far better with those three million trade unionists who choose to pay the political levy in what I believe is a positive act of democratic participation; trying what socialist parties around the world have done with experiments like free party membership to become mass networks; building up the connections with civic society that new media make possible. Movement not just machine should be our watchword.

And we must finally be a strong opposition. We are in a unique situation. The Conservatives spent the whole election campaign running against a hung Parliament and they are now in coalition with the people who depend on a hung Parliament for power. Meanwhile the Lib Dems told people to vote for them to keep the Tories out, and ended up bringing the Tories in. So much for new politics. We need to be an opposition which is constructive where possible, and determined, raucus, passionate, obstinate where necessary.

These are big tasks. And we may not have much time to do them. So we need to start in this leadership campaign. We say we believe in new politics. Let’s show it.

The country will not be looking at us carefully in the next few months, but they will notice us; they will be quietly judging our character; they will not follow the details of what we say but they will notice how we behave. So this campaign needs to be a credit to the party. I propose to run my campaign in the following ways, to bring credit to the party: there will be no negative briefing about other candidates; it’s not my way and I won’t be starting now; the people who work for me will be chosen because they don’t do it either; we will tackle unattributable briefing through my named spokeswoman Lisa Tremble; we will listen to every MP and candidate, whether or not they support me, for their ideas about what the country needs and the public want; they’ve just spent weeks on the doorstep and we need to make the most of that knowledge; we will listen to the country as well as campaign in the party; we will take the party and its ideas out into the constituencies we have lost as well as those we have won; and we will raise money for the party; lets face it – the financial disadvantage we faced at the election was made by error not nature; I will start as I mean to go on, giving at least one third of the funds I raise for this campaign into a fighting fund for the next general election.

This leadership election is the beginning not the end. Ideas without organisation is futile; and organisation without ideas is sterile. We know the battleground of politics – not within the party but with the government; the politics of power: we never nailed the Tories on the vacuousness of the Big Society because we did not demonstrate our belief in the empowering state not the big state; the Labour Party was created in part to empower people, and we must never lose sight of that mission

- the politics of protection: what we need to provide ourselves, what the state needs to provide, and what needs to be done together; it’s about rights and responsibilities together, in welfare, in social care, in respect of crime and anti social behaviour
- the politics of belonging: what the world looks like out of your front window, in the semi detached house or the tower block; how much migration, how much change in housing, the local environment, local amenities.

I know the sort of Britain I want to live in. A country where power is redistributed, merit rewarded as well as needs met, global connections celebrated. And I know what sort of Labour Party we need to deliver that Britain: a living breathing movement not just a machine.

The amorality of diplomacy

David Miliband was not at his best on the Today programme this morning as he tried to explain the Government's position on Libya and the release of the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi. In part, this was due to the inexplicable failure of Gordon Brown to explain the Government's position clearly.

It would seem to be this. First, it is good that Libya has given up WMDs and terrorism, and is now co-operative with rather than antipathetic to western nations, particularly Britain. Second, there are important trade interests with Libya, including oil. Third, while the Government was not actively seeking the release of al-Meghrahi, nor was it going to stand in the way of a Scottish government doing so either as part of the prison transfer arrangements or on compassionate grounds. By saying that Brown didn't want his death in prison, Bill Rammell was simply saying this. After all, it was a Scottish decision. The fourth point that hasn't been made as strongly as it should is a clear reiteration of abhorrence about the Lockerbie bombing and its horrendous death toll, and its perpetrator, which is why relatives are so angry about the Scottish decision.

But, that said, this is a defensible if uncomfortable position for the UK government to take, not least because Libya's abandonment of terrorism and WMDs has probably saved many lives. The problem has been that the government has not made its case, at least until yesterday, or attempted to defend it, particularly in the United States, a country that has rarely been shy in advancing national trade or security interests, even under Barack Obama.

Of course, it is abhorrent that al-Meghrahi has been released. But does anybody believe for a minute that if St Dave gets his hands on the keys to No 10 he would not act as Bill Rammell did in similar circumstances? It was noticeable that Cameron did not properly answer Jim Naughtie's question this morning, asking whether faced with a Libyan question as to whether the UK government wanted al-Megrahi to die in a British prison, in a situation where vital security and trade interests were at stake, he would say 'of course I do' rather than use a more diplomatic form of words. Of course, he wouldn't, as David Blackburn points out at the Spectator. Cameron, too, needs to level with the public.

Labour needs US-style primaries

David Miliband is absolutely right to argue for a system of registered party supporters, as in the United States, in his article in Tribune (ironically not online, though significantly a Tribune leader attacking him is!).

As with most parties, Labour has been rapidly losing members in recent years, as its dated ways of doing business slip into increasing irrelevance nearly a decade into the 21st century. What Miliband is proposing is not a free-for-all as with the Tories in Totnes, but a system of registered supporters who vote in primaries, and are presumably available for invitation to fundraising and other events.

It was dispiriting to hear Neal Lawson, once a serious moderniser, defending the status quo - albeit with PR whichI support - presumably in the knowledge that a smaller party may be more likely to succumb to vote-losing ideas, as it did in the eighties. It is simply untenable to expect that the only people who should have a view on Labour's candidates are those who turn up to hear the minutes of the last meeting read before the guest speaker from Compass or the self-styled Campaign for Labour Party Democracy drones on about the evils of a three-term Labour government and the wonders of Hugo Chavez.

If politics is to regain a relevance in people's lives, we need simpler structures and much more flexibility about how people can register their support and get involved.

A sense of proportion

There's not much that David Miliband and John Major agree on. But the total lack of proportion shown by the BBC in leading with the silly story about John Sawers' wife's Facebook site presented a rare show on unity on this morning's Marr show. One expects such faux-scandals to dominate the Sunday redtops. On a day of crisis in Iran and Afghanistan, it should not be leading the BBC TV and radio bulletins.

MPs speaking on their specialist subjects

Bob Marshall-Andrews and Geraldine Smith, two MPs who probably don't know what their Labour colleagues look like, so seldom do they grace the Government lobbies, have called for David Miliband to be sacked for disloyalty. Mr Marshall-Andrews apparently described the Guardian article as 'duplicitous' behaviour while Ms Smith declared he had 'overstepped the line.'

It is always good to see MPs speaking on their specialist subjects.

What is David Miliband up to?

In any leadership election, David Miliband would undoubtedly be the front-runner. But he has always played a cautious game until now. He declined to spark a leadership contest against Gordon Brown last year, rightly calculating that he would lose and that it would diminish his standing in the future. Now, his excellent article in today's Guardian has created suspicions in a media anxious to pretend that an empty Westminster is riven with plots, that he is planning to challenge Gordon imminently. Michael White has a good take on it all on his blog (and a reminder that like most politicians, Miliband is heading off on his holidays). I think the most we can say is that Miliband is putting down a marker; but the thesis that he advances in his article is one that sets the minimum parameters for the Prime Minister in September for his conference speech, as much as it is the start of the Miliband leadership manifesto.

Miliband for Chancellor

Amidst the welter of gloomy, gleeful and predictable commentary on the government's woes, there is one practical and good suggestion: Peter Hyman, makes an excellent case for making David Miliband chancellor. In truth, Gordon should have done this last year; Alastair Darling, for all his political strengths, is not the right person to reassure the public or front media interviews in these times of economic difficulty. As Peter says:

I'm sure Mr Miliband himself would rather continue as Foreign Secretary, but moving him to the Treasury would show something else: that Mr Brown has the confidence to trust someone with the job, who is not in his inner circle, someone with an independent streak, who would not be pushed around. Mr Miliband would have the opportunity to take the fight back to the Tories, put David Cameron and George Osborne on the back foot and push forward a powerful agenda around his key theme of empowerment, giving people greater control over their lives.

Gordon's poll bounce

Gordon Brown has had an excellent start as Prime Minister. He has avoided the temptation to tilt to the left, but has nonetheless injected fresh energy into the Government. Cabinet appointments like David Miliband and Jacqui Smith at senior levels have given the government a freshness and youth which has made Cameron's Tories feel tired. Today's poll for the Sunday Telegraph suggests that the public agrees. Miliband was in top form on this morning's Sunday AM, making clear where UK foreign policy lies. However, he does need to make clear who's boss to some of his junior team.