Losing the Argument
Philip Collins writes for The Times regularly and in a previous life was the chief speech writer for the most successful Labour leader ever, Tony Blair.
Yet in this opinion piece Philip Collins delivers a devastating verdict on the current Labour leader, Ed Miliband, and his party's lack of a convincing message for the voting public with the next general election only a year away.
I have to say I agree with his assessment because Labour has deliberately given the impression that the party would have sorted out the public finances without taking any tough decisions which no one believes, of course.
Ed Miliband has also been banging on like a broken record about the squeezed middle when it's perfectly clear that the artificially low interest rates since 2008 have been a 'Godsend' to middle income families with a mortgage because their housing costs have fallen significantly over the past six years.
So is Labour trying to champion the interests of the lower paid or better off?
Who knows for sure, but my experience of working on equal pay for the past 10 years tells me that Labour has got its priorities all wrong.
One by one, Labour is losing the arguments
By Philip Collins
Because Ed Miliband never apologised for overspending he may never convince voters that he’ll keep control of their taxes
Most Budgets don’t matter but this one does. It minted no truths but it dramatised and confirmed two old ones: clearing up a mess is what Conservatives like to do and Labour is stuck in a mess of its own making.
The principal aim of Mr Osborne’s bold reforms to savings is that he might be remembered for something other than spending cuts. The drastic fall in the share prices of Aviva and Legal and General proved both that anything Ed Miliband can do to ruin the prospects of big companies George Osborne can do better and that investors know a big reform when they see one. This was the act of a man who realises he might not be Chancellor for much longer. Time to get something done.
It is, happily for Mr Osborne, but not at all coincidentally, also the most astute riposte to Ukip, the Conservatives have yet managed. The promise of a referendum on Europe was never going to bring people back to the Tory fold from Ukip because, strange to say, most of them don’t care much about Europe. Neither was an immigration cap ever likely to work politically because it was never likely to work practically. Offering people lower tax on their savings and the chance to get hold of their own cash is much more like it.
Mr Miliband’s response was, alas, an insipid cover version of a song that flopped the last three times he put it out. Whole lines were pasted in from previous Budget responses. It is conventional to say that replying to the Budget is the most difficult gig in the parliamentary calendar but this is just letting Mr Miliband off the hook. An audition to be prime minister shouldn’t be easy. Besides, the proposal to abolish annuities is hardly a novel one. Anyone who spent years as an adviser in the Treasury, as Mr Miliband did, ought to know the arguments well enough to have acknowledged that the Chancellor had just proposed a revolution in the savings market.
Labour leaders in the past have managed it. Replying to Geoffrey Howe’s Budget in 1981, it takes Michael Foot no more than three paragraphs to congratulate the Chancellor for closing the Vestey loophole before a detailed account of precisely why Mr Howe’s reduction in the minimum lending rate was welcome but insufficient. No, it’s not that difficult and Mr Miliband cannot be granted a bad day.
There is more to the poverty of his performance than that. The Budget response, unfortunately, dramatised the second underlying truth of British politics, which is that Labour remains terminally vulnerable on the economy. Mr Miliband was reduced to recycling his speech because, boxed into a corner, he doesn’t know what else he can say. The speech he gave on Wednesday was the sum total of his errors of strategy.
The most calamitous error, from which there has never been a clear way back, was not to concede, early and clearly, that Labour had carried on spending long after retrenchment was needed. Refusing to admit any culpability at all gave Mr Osborne the opportunity he relished to pin all the blame on Labour. It was and is an unfair charge but Labour should have seen it coming and conceded guilt to the lesser charges in order to avoid going down for the job lot.
This mistake was compounded by a period of opposition in which Labour spokesmen bared their teeth and vented their public loathing of cuts with such abandon that it felt as if they were enjoying themselves. The public from the beginning regarded the cuts as undesirable but necessary. It regarded the coalition as doctors with a poor bedside manner rather than butchers. The anger felt out of proportion and cemented the idea that Labour was not capable of the toughness needed.
It was a mistake not to set out a list of indicative cuts that Labour was actively proposing. The accusation of being profligate and soft-headed was a serious charge that Mr Miliband never did enough to counter. The Budget repeated another obvious truth, which is that the next term of government will be dominated by more cuts to state spending. We still have almost no idea at all how Labour will cope with this.
If all of the above was thought to be too difficult, or to concede too much, then the only other option was for Labour to develop a bold programme for reform of the State. If the Opposition had turned itself into a laboratory of experimental ideas for improved service quality at a lower price, then the aversion to austerity might not have sounded so much like an avoidance of reality. However, Labour, the party that takes on private vested interests, has been too ready to turn into the party of the public sector interest.
The upshot is that, with all options for moving forward ruled out, Labour goes nowhere. Or rather, it is thrown back towards the past. If cuts are too awful and reform too upsetting to contemplate, then it must follow that the burden of Labour government will be taken by tax. We end up then at the end of a series of strategic mistakes, with a very familiar charge that will reverberate all the way from now to the election of May 2015: Labour will tax and Labour will spend.
When Labour was crying foul over a lack of growth, it was obvious that the economy would at some point turn. Now it looks as if earnings are about to creep ahead of prices. One by one, the arguments are falling over. Labour might yet act in belated desperation. It might say that the welfare cap is such a good idea that it should apply to all public spending and set itself a cash limit. It might offer details of what the State should stop doing. It might devise a serious programme for the reform of state services. Only it won’t and it is, in any case, probably too late.
The political psychology is now set to change. This will be the moment, notwithstanding a bit of a rumble around the European elections, that the Tory ranks start to close. It will be one of those rare moments when the public takes the political temperature and finds Mr Osborne is simmering nicely and Mr Miliband is in his own chilly micro-climate.
The Budget did not cause these facts but it will be an occasion on which they are confirmed and observed. The irony that Michael Foot summoned for Geoffrey Howe in 1981 applies to Mr Miliband: “When the right honourable and learned Gentleman lapses into opacity, obliquity or even direct obscurity, I am sure that he always does so on purpose.” Real politics is happening underneath the surface. Slowly, the water is receding, leaving only the rocks on which the hopes of Mr Miliband will be dashed.
Because Ed Miliband never apologised for overspending he may never convince voters that he’ll keep control of their taxes
Most Budgets don’t matter but this one does. It minted no truths but it dramatised and confirmed two old ones: clearing up a mess is what Conservatives like to do and Labour is stuck in a mess of its own making.
The principal aim of Mr Osborne’s bold reforms to savings is that he might be remembered for something other than spending cuts. The drastic fall in the share prices of Aviva and Legal and General proved both that anything Ed Miliband can do to ruin the prospects of big companies George Osborne can do better and that investors know a big reform when they see one. This was the act of a man who realises he might not be Chancellor for much longer. Time to get something done.
It is, happily for Mr Osborne, but not at all coincidentally, also the most astute riposte to Ukip, the Conservatives have yet managed. The promise of a referendum on Europe was never going to bring people back to the Tory fold from Ukip because, strange to say, most of them don’t care much about Europe. Neither was an immigration cap ever likely to work politically because it was never likely to work practically. Offering people lower tax on their savings and the chance to get hold of their own cash is much more like it.
Mr Miliband’s response was, alas, an insipid cover version of a song that flopped the last three times he put it out. Whole lines were pasted in from previous Budget responses. It is conventional to say that replying to the Budget is the most difficult gig in the parliamentary calendar but this is just letting Mr Miliband off the hook. An audition to be prime minister shouldn’t be easy. Besides, the proposal to abolish annuities is hardly a novel one. Anyone who spent years as an adviser in the Treasury, as Mr Miliband did, ought to know the arguments well enough to have acknowledged that the Chancellor had just proposed a revolution in the savings market.
Labour leaders in the past have managed it. Replying to Geoffrey Howe’s Budget in 1981, it takes Michael Foot no more than three paragraphs to congratulate the Chancellor for closing the Vestey loophole before a detailed account of precisely why Mr Howe’s reduction in the minimum lending rate was welcome but insufficient. No, it’s not that difficult and Mr Miliband cannot be granted a bad day.
There is more to the poverty of his performance than that. The Budget response, unfortunately, dramatised the second underlying truth of British politics, which is that Labour remains terminally vulnerable on the economy. Mr Miliband was reduced to recycling his speech because, boxed into a corner, he doesn’t know what else he can say. The speech he gave on Wednesday was the sum total of his errors of strategy.
The most calamitous error, from which there has never been a clear way back, was not to concede, early and clearly, that Labour had carried on spending long after retrenchment was needed. Refusing to admit any culpability at all gave Mr Osborne the opportunity he relished to pin all the blame on Labour. It was and is an unfair charge but Labour should have seen it coming and conceded guilt to the lesser charges in order to avoid going down for the job lot.
This mistake was compounded by a period of opposition in which Labour spokesmen bared their teeth and vented their public loathing of cuts with such abandon that it felt as if they were enjoying themselves. The public from the beginning regarded the cuts as undesirable but necessary. It regarded the coalition as doctors with a poor bedside manner rather than butchers. The anger felt out of proportion and cemented the idea that Labour was not capable of the toughness needed.
It was a mistake not to set out a list of indicative cuts that Labour was actively proposing. The accusation of being profligate and soft-headed was a serious charge that Mr Miliband never did enough to counter. The Budget repeated another obvious truth, which is that the next term of government will be dominated by more cuts to state spending. We still have almost no idea at all how Labour will cope with this.
If all of the above was thought to be too difficult, or to concede too much, then the only other option was for Labour to develop a bold programme for reform of the State. If the Opposition had turned itself into a laboratory of experimental ideas for improved service quality at a lower price, then the aversion to austerity might not have sounded so much like an avoidance of reality. However, Labour, the party that takes on private vested interests, has been too ready to turn into the party of the public sector interest.
The upshot is that, with all options for moving forward ruled out, Labour goes nowhere. Or rather, it is thrown back towards the past. If cuts are too awful and reform too upsetting to contemplate, then it must follow that the burden of Labour government will be taken by tax. We end up then at the end of a series of strategic mistakes, with a very familiar charge that will reverberate all the way from now to the election of May 2015: Labour will tax and Labour will spend.
When Labour was crying foul over a lack of growth, it was obvious that the economy would at some point turn. Now it looks as if earnings are about to creep ahead of prices. One by one, the arguments are falling over. Labour might yet act in belated desperation. It might say that the welfare cap is such a good idea that it should apply to all public spending and set itself a cash limit. It might offer details of what the State should stop doing. It might devise a serious programme for the reform of state services. Only it won’t and it is, in any case, probably too late.
The political psychology is now set to change. This will be the moment, notwithstanding a bit of a rumble around the European elections, that the Tory ranks start to close. It will be one of those rare moments when the public takes the political temperature and finds Mr Osborne is simmering nicely and Mr Miliband is in his own chilly micro-climate.
The Budget did not cause these facts but it will be an occasion on which they are confirmed and observed. The irony that Michael Foot summoned for Geoffrey Howe in 1981 applies to Mr Miliband: “When the right honourable and learned Gentleman lapses into opacity, obliquity or even direct obscurity, I am sure that he always does so on purpose.” Real politics is happening underneath the surface. Slowly, the water is receding, leaving only the rocks on which the hopes of Mr Miliband will be dashed.
