Forging Ahead

Michael White writing in the Guardian seems to agree that Ed Miliband's speech to the TUC failed to hit the spot - but the grudging applause of delegates is not the best way to judge the significance of the Labour leader's plans to forge a new relationship with the country's trade unions.  

Ed Miliband fails to find TUC's erogenous zone

With applause ranging from tepid to polite, the Labour leader's speech was less rabble-rousing than rabble-dousing


By Michael White

Ed Miliband tried to excite delegates but they didn't seem in the mood. 

Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Ed Miliband went to Bournemouth for a job interview to find out whether the big trade unions would give Labour the new zero-hours contract he has been trying to negotiate. Instead of regular monthly cheques from their political funds, he waits by the phone until needed. Greater flexibility, reduced costs and everyone benefits except him.

As with much else in the Labour pledges department Ed is still working on the detail.

His day-trip to the TUC's 2013 conference was bound to be tricky. Not since Barack Obama tied himself in knots over Syria has a leader painted red lines as recklessly as Miliband has over union funding. His Cunning Falkirk Plan will slash their welfare payments to Labour – or reform them, as Iain Duncan Smith would put it.

To say the Labour leader's 20-minute speech went badly would be unfair. No one heckled or booed him this time; most delegates stopped tweeting and emailing to listen for a bit. But to say it went very well would also be a bit of a stretch, though Unite's genial Len McCluskey later said he liked it, cunning fellow. Let's just say of the speech that it went.

With applause ranging from tepid to polite, it was less rabble-rousing than rabble-dousing. Ed looked a little nervous pacing the platform without notes or visible Autocue: was he looking for them or had he learned the speech by heart? The latter, more or less. Either way, there is still too much cerebral head, not enough heart in Miliband oratory. Thinktank wonkery does not win elections.

In fairness, Ed noticeably warmed up after reaching the Q&A, mostly with people so much younger than himself that he could play the old fartonian about his school days ("a long time ago"). Since the conference had spent the morning debating pension problems, assorted privatisations and legal aid cuts most delegates sounded as cheerful as Vince Cable with a toothache.

Ed was duly introduced in funereal style by the conference chairman, Lesley Mercer (cheer up Lesley, it's only 20 minutes), and then proceeded to praise not one but two Tory prime ministers. Admittedly both are dead and one was Disraeli, a long-haired, romantic intellectual of the type familiar in TUC circles. But few now remember Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, the PM who encouraged trade unions rather than abused them. He was another "Red Ed", quipped Miliband. Don't use that one again, Ed.

Apart from the necessary passage about reform – getting more rank-and-file trade unionists involved in local Labour parties is "an exciting idea", he bravely insisted to thunderous silence – Ed worked frantically to stroke the TUC's erogenous zones.

"Millionaires' tax breaks, snobbery, bankers' bonuses," he whispered. "Apprenticeships, affordable houses, investment, nurses," he saucily added when he judged the conference suitably inflamed. But the conference didn't seem in the mood. Conferences often have headaches.

Yet Ed's most exotic passage came when he praised Britain's "forgotten wealth-creators" This was not a reference to Brunel or Michael Faraday – giants of Lord Derby's prime – but to low-paid toilers who go out to work early "before George Osborne's curtains are open and come back late at night when he has closed them again".

This seemed to be a bid to reclaim the curtain vote from the chancellor, who routinely claims that low-paid dawn toilers resent neighbours whose curtails remain closed until the pub opens for them to spend their dole on champagne and oysters. But audiences need priming for a joke like that.

Unprimed it sounded like posh curtain-twitcher's gossip from Notting Hill, where everyone's curtains come from the Osborne family's upmarket fabrics catalogue.