Slow Boat To China

I suppose the old saying about getting a slow boat to China - comes from the days when travelling on the high seas was the only show in town - yet going to some parts of the world must have felt like taking a one-way ticket to the moon.

My parents travelled to Canada by boat when they left Glasgow for Windsor, Ontario in the early 1950s - which is where I was born incidentally - but that only took 10 or 12 days all in because they were on a modern liner not a sailing ship.

Years later when my mother was able to come back to Glasgow to visit friends and relatives - we came by plane, which I don't remember, but I'm sure made me sick as I am not the world's greatest traveller even to this day.

I thought about these things as I read Philip Collins' piece in The Times the other day - for such a young man Ed Miliband strikes me as a terribly timid fellow - nice I'm sure but not much of a risk taker which is an essential feature of a really good politician.

Sometimes you've got to be bold - in my book - whereas modern politics tends to be about focus groups and weighing the odds.

So the question is - 'Does Ed really have something different and interesting to say about the welfare state - or is he just going to follow David Cameron's lead and become a pale imitation of the Tories all the way to the next general election?'

This slow march will get Miliband nowhere

By Philip Collins

At last Labour has crept towards reality on welfare spending. Now it must find the courage for a decisive leap.

I vividly remember the moment I learnt what would, for the outside world, come only later. We were gathered in the Cabinet Room waiting for Tony Blair whose meeting with Gordon Brown about a stable and orderly leadership transition had dragged on. Finally, on the point of us giving up, Mr Blair came through the adjoining door to his den, stopped and said, into the air as if to nobody: “He’s got nothing. I’ve seen the plan. He’s got nothing.

The mystery of how Mr Brown could prepare to be prime minister for a decade and yet arrive in Downing Street with nothing is still unsolved. But the trail leads to Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour Party and all the way towards the speech that he gave in Newham yesterday.

Mr Miliband gave a serious and substantive address on welfare spending, one of the issues on which Labour had lost the trust of the electorate by 2010. Three days earlier, Ed Balls, his Shadow Chancellor, tried to reset the party’s economic policy.

Labour has now hinted that it will match George Osborne’s spending plans. Mr Balls has decided that winter fuel allowance will be taken away from the rich and child benefit will not be restored. Mr Miliband declared his intention, albeit rather vaguely, to cap welfare spending and he winked at the idea that the welfare state should reward those who have paid in more generously than those who have not. There is no doubt that Mr Miliband was closer to public opinion when he sat down than he was when he stood up.

The rest of the speech was a little like the Irishman in the joke. Mr Miliband wouldn’t start from here. He would create more jobs so that benefits for the unemployed cost less. He wants to build more houses so that rents come down. He wants companies to pay more so that wages do not have to be subsidised through tax credits.

These are all perfectly good points. Welfare is the name we give to policy failure in other departments. But Mr Miliband suffers from the Brown problem of trying to dispel an impression he has allowed to linger for too long. In December he was pledging war on benefit cuts. He has wasted no opportunity to berate Tory spending plans and taken no opportunity to change his own economic argument.

This is the backdrop against which his fine speech yesterday is viewed. When Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, makes speeches about the structural causes of welfare spending, he is praised for being high- minded. When Mr Miliband says the same thing he just sounds left-wing.

If Mr Miliband had used his first speech as leader to demand fiscal discipline and a welfare cap he would today have been cementing an already established position. It would have been a more detailed extension of an established trajectory, not an uncomfortable change of course.

This has not been a week the two Eds thought they would ever be forced to have. They imagined they would be proved right about austerity, allaying fears about Labour profligacy. They thought the political victory thus won would translate into anger at the cuts and a different mood towards their victims. If in October 2010 Mr Balls and Mr Miliband had been shown the texts they delivered this week, they would have reacted in a Brown-on- Blair way, dismissing them for conceding too much political ground to the right.

As someone who has advocated just this change, it would be churlish not to welcome the shift. Labour is in a better place at the end of the week than it was at the start. But behind the move lurks a troubling question. Labour now has positions, on the economy and on welfare, that were inevitable and yet were reached reluctantly. Why does the Labour Party move so glacially to the right place and how it can speed up?

One interpretation is that this week has been a defensive reaction to Labour’s poor showing in the local elections, an opinion poll rating that has stalled and awful numbers for its leader. Either that, or Mr Miliband has moved to avoid a trap on welfare that has been set for him by Mr Osborne.

There is truth in all of these reasons but not the whole truth. Mr Balls and Mr Miliband are both lieutenants of Mr Brown and there is in the latter’s missing plan a clue to Labour’s slow creep to the centre. On foundation trust hospitals, pension reform, academies, identity cards and tuition fees, Mr Brown let it be known that he disagreed with Mr Blair’s policy. He implied, without ever specifying his alternative, that his own view would be morally superior. Then he would say “no” all the way up to the point that he was forced to say “yes” because he couldn’t think of anything else.

Some of this was a hatred of ideas invented in the rival camp. Some of it was the expression of a character trait — deep caution being Mr Brown’s signature tune. But ultimately the cause of the paralysis was intellectual rather than psychological. Mr Brown analysed himself into nothingness because his own instincts collided with the country he aspired to rule. Finally, and only when the deadline loomed, would he do what he should have done all along. Brownism turned out to be Blairism, only extremely reluctant, highly anguished and very, very late.

Mr Miliband is really late on the economy and welfare. This week could and should have happened long ago. Whether late is better than never remains to be seen. On welfare, the test will be in the policy detail but his chances are good. On the economy, Labour is coming from a lot farther back and Mr Miliband and Mr Balls need to return, time and again, to the same tune, at the same pitch, that they have sung this week. Mr Miliband has had a tendency to say a great deal once but not much twice, which is what you do when you are not entirely sure what you are trying to say.

But, credit where it is due. There are signs that Labour understands that politics without money is hard. The next stage is to apply the insight in the arena in which it really bites — the reform of public services. Labour has as yet nothing interesting to say about either health or education. It needs to have, starting yesterday.

This week is a lesson. The choice before Labour now is whether to creep in denial towards reform or to get there in a single leap. This shift needs to be shouted, often. The only alternative is to end up with nothing because a week, unfortunately, is not long enough in politics.