Snooty Elite (26/11/14)
Jason Cowley, editor of the left wing New Statesman magazine, created something of a political 'shitstorm' the other week in publishing a less than flattering portrayal of Ed Miliband, as the leader of a badly out-of-touch Labour Party.
But Jason goes even further in this no holds barred article for The Mail newspaper in which he lambasts the snooty metropolitan elite running the Labour Party these days, many of whom have made very cosy lives for themselves while purporting to speak for ordinary, everyday people.
Ed's snooty elite hates patriotism, says editor of left-wing journal that triggered Labour leadership crisis
By JASON COWLEY FOR THE DAILY MAIL
Two weeks ago, JASON COWLEY, editor of Labour’s house journal the New Statesman, triggered Ed Miliband’s leadership crisis by describing him as an ‘old-style Hampstead socialist’ and ‘quasi-Marxist’. Here, he delivers a withering post-Rochester verdict . . .
When did Labour become the party of vested interests and snooty metropolitans? When did a modest terrace house, a white van and the flag of England become symbols of contempt for the Left?
Emily Thornberry, the Islington MP and lawyer, who, while campaigning in Rochester and Strood, sneeringly tweeted a picture of a house bedecked in England flags, has been forced to resign from the Labour front bench.
But her tweet and Ed Miliband’s panicked response to it epitomise why Labour is so desperately struggling to connect with voters and why Miliband has lost the confidence of many of his MPs.
Ed Miliband's panicked response to Emily Thornberry's tweet epitomises why he's lost his MP's confidence
Miliband leads a party that purports to speak for and aspires to represent, in his own awkward phrase, ‘everyday people’. But many in Labour have a problem with these very same ‘everyday people’, especially if they do not share their liberalism or metropolitan prejudices.
The snooty metropolitan Labourite doesn’t like these people’s patriotism. They don’t understand why they might be attracted to the populist rhetoric of Nigel Farage’s Ukip. They dismiss legitimate concerns about immigration and the fracturing of social cohesion as bigotry.
'I got it wrong' - Emily Thornberry sacked after snobby tweet
Nor does the snooty metropolitan elite seem to grasp that swathes of society do not work in the public sector and that two-thirds of private-sector workers do not even have pensions.
I’ve mocked Miliband for being a Hampstead socialist who does not understand lower-middle-class aspiration. Like Emily Thornberry, he lives in a grand house in North London. He studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, the obligatory degree for our out-of-touch political class, and then, because he was considered ‘Labour aristocracy’, went straight to work for Gordon Brown at the Treasury.
The Labour supporting New Statesman has questioned whether Ed Miliband can succeed
He had a brief sabbatical teaching at Harvard University. Then he was gifted a safe seat in Doncaster, fast-tracked into the Cabinet, after which he became leader of the party in his early 40s. Some struggle.
Miliband’s life experience is extraordinarily narrow. He has never worked in or run a business, and can scarcely bring himself to mention wealth-creation in his speeches. He has never lived or worked among the urban poor, as Clement Attlee, Labour’s greatest prime minister, did as a young man at Toynbee Hall in London’s East End.
Miliband is a member of what George Osborne privately calls ‘The Guild’ of career politicians. But, to adapt a saying of the great cricket writer C L R James, what do they know of politics who only politics know?
Emily Thornberry’s tweet could not have been more ill-timed or more symptomatic of a deeper malaise. If Labour were serious about wanting to win a mandate for the far-reaching political and economic reform it says the country needs, it would be aspiring to win back Rochester, which it held from 1997 to 2010. Instead, it stands on the sidelines and sneers, even as it is routed at the polls.
Draw a metaphorical line from the Wash estuary in Norfolk to the River Severn. South of the Severn-Wash line, excluding London, there are 197 seats, of which Labour holds ten. In the aspirational English south the party is hugely unpopular — and becoming more so.
Labour confronts a weak and divided Tory party. A more accomplished leader than Miliband would have seized this moment and found a way to address not only people’s anxieties but also their aspirations.
Miliband can seem a relentlessly gloomy politician, who is interested not in building a coalition of all the people but in appealing only to the bottom third of society. He speaks as if too many of us are victims whose lives can be redeemed only by state action. It’s old-style, top-down, the-man-in-Whitehall-knows-best Fabianism.
I’ve mocked Miliband for being a Hampstead socialist who does not understand lower-middle-class aspiration. Like Emily Thornberry, he lives in a grand house in North London. He studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, the obligatory degree for our out-of-touch political class, and then, because he was considered ‘Labour aristocracy’, went straight to work for Gordon Brown at the Treasury.
The Labour supporting New Statesman has questioned whether Ed Miliband can succeed
He had a brief sabbatical teaching at Harvard University. Then he was gifted a safe seat in Doncaster, fast-tracked into the Cabinet, after which he became leader of the party in his early 40s. Some struggle.
Miliband’s life experience is extraordinarily narrow. He has never worked in or run a business, and can scarcely bring himself to mention wealth-creation in his speeches. He has never lived or worked among the urban poor, as Clement Attlee, Labour’s greatest prime minister, did as a young man at Toynbee Hall in London’s East End.
Miliband is a member of what George Osborne privately calls ‘The Guild’ of career politicians. But, to adapt a saying of the great cricket writer C L R James, what do they know of politics who only politics know?
Emily Thornberry’s tweet could not have been more ill-timed or more symptomatic of a deeper malaise. If Labour were serious about wanting to win a mandate for the far-reaching political and economic reform it says the country needs, it would be aspiring to win back Rochester, which it held from 1997 to 2010. Instead, it stands on the sidelines and sneers, even as it is routed at the polls.
Draw a metaphorical line from the Wash estuary in Norfolk to the River Severn. South of the Severn-Wash line, excluding London, there are 197 seats, of which Labour holds ten. In the aspirational English south the party is hugely unpopular — and becoming more so.
Labour confronts a weak and divided Tory party. A more accomplished leader than Miliband would have seized this moment and found a way to address not only people’s anxieties but also their aspirations.
Miliband can seem a relentlessly gloomy politician, who is interested not in building a coalition of all the people but in appealing only to the bottom third of society. He speaks as if too many of us are victims whose lives can be redeemed only by state action. It’s old-style, top-down, the-man-in-Whitehall-knows-best Fabianism.
Ed Miliband is only interested in appealing to the bottom third of society and can seem relentlessly gloomy
During the Scottish referendum campaign, I spent some time with Alex Salmond, now former leader of the Scottish National Party. In many ways, Salmond is a high-class huckster, spinning improbable yarns.
But he is also a brilliant popular communicator. He speaks about Scotland and its people with optimism and in a style and tone that resonate.
Now, the SNP has become the natural party of government and it is poised to storm Labour’s Scottish strongholds in next May’s election.
Back in the early days of his leadership, Miliband and his advisers liked to compare themselves with Margaret Thatcher. They admired her conviction and the way she transformed Britain by smashing an economic consensus. The Milibandites described their ambition as similarly ‘Thatcheresque’.
Yet Mrs Thatcher once said: ‘The Old Testament prophets did not say, “Brothers, I want a consensus.” They said, “This is my faith. This is what I passionately believe. If you believe it, too, then come with me.”’
The trouble for Ed Miliband is that he has told us what he believes, but, lethally for him and the Labour Party, fewer and fewer people believe him or want to come with him, as events in Rochester showed.
Parallel Universe (12 November 2014)
The New Statesman (NS) magazine has long been a 'critical friend' of the Labour Party and I've written for the NS myself, albeit some years ago now.
But this article by the magazine's editor, Jason Cowley, makes for worrying reading for any Labour supporters out there, and not just because it paints a very unflattering portrait of the party leader, Ed Miliband.
The problem is that a pro-Labour magazine is speaking honestly and is reinforcing the widespread view among voters that Ed lives in some kind of parallel universe.
The problem is that a pro-Labour magazine is speaking honestly and is reinforcing the widespread view among voters that Ed lives in some kind of parallel universe.
And that's not good for any politician, especially one with ambitions to become Prime Minister.
Jason Cowley on the struggles and woes of the Labour leader.
BY JASON COWLEY - The New Statesman
Ed Miliband in Manchester last week to meet council leaders. Photo: Nigel Roddis/Getty
Early one morning in September 2012 I visited Ed Miliband at home in north London. He had just returned from holiday in Greece and this was to be his first interview of the new political season, his big re-entry. He remembers the interview as the one in which he was photographed “sitting in the bushes”. I remember it as the occasion on which he showcased his new Big Idea – “predistribution”, a concept adapted from the Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker.
Having commendably held his party together when many had predicted it would split into warring factions, Miliband had grand plans. His mission was to change the rules of capitalism and to direct markets for the common good. Inequality was the scourge of our age, he told me. People felt the system was rigged against them. But the financial crisis and the Great Recession had created a social-democratic moment.
“For me it’s a centre-left moment because people think there’s something unfair and unjust about our society. You’ve got to bring the vested interest to heel; you’ve got to change the way the economy works. That’s our opportunity.” Not once did he mention Ukip or even countenance the possibility that a right-wing populist insurgency would erupt into the space that progressive politics hoped to occupy.
Miliband has a deterministic, quasi-Marxist analysis of our present ills. The Ukip insurgency, Scottish nationalism, the hollowing out of political parties, Islamist radicalisation, the loathing and distrust of elites: all are manifestations of a failed economic model.
He is a politician of unusual self-confidence. Considering his appalling approval ratings and the lack of enthusiasm many of his MPs have for him, he has exceptional resilience. It’s as if he is driven by a sense of manifest destiny, always dangerous in a politician. But what if he is wrong? What if the majority of people do not share his world-view? What if they want something more prosaic: economic competence, prosperity for themselves and their children, social justice and their government to protect them against the havoc being wreaked by globalisation? Miliband would argue that this is what he is offering through “responsible capitalism”. Yet there exists a gulf between the radicalism of his rhetoric and the low-toned incrementalism of his policies.
From the beginning Labour was always an uneasy coalition of the organised working class and the Fabian or Hampstead intellectual. Later it also became the party of public-sector workers, social liberals and dispossessed minorities. Miliband is very much an old-style Hampstead socialist. He doesn’t really understand the lower middle class or material aspiration. He doesn’t understand Essex Man or Woman. Politics for him must seem at times like an extended PPE seminar: elevated talk about political economy and the good society.
At present, he and Labour seem trapped. His MPs sense it and the polls reflect it. Ukip is attracting support in the party’s old working-class northern English heartlands and winning converts in key Home Counties swing seats that Labour would once have hoped to win. In Scotland the SNP has become the natural party of government.
In a recent interview, Alex Salmond was scathing about Miliband, describing him as “more unelectable” than Michael Foot. He had none of “Foot’s wonderful qualities or intelligence. He’s more unelectable than Neil Kinnock was; and Kinnock had considerable powers of oratory, and didn’t lack political courage.” One would expect Salmond to be dismissive of a Labour leader but it is worrying for the party that even allies now speak similarly of him and his failings.
Miliband is losing the support of the left (to the SNP, to the Greens) without having formed a broader coalition of a kind that defined the early Blair-Brown years. Most damaging, I think, is that he seldom seems optimistic about the country he wishes to lead. Miliband speaks too often of struggle and failure, of people as victims – and it’s true that life is difficult for many. But a nation also wants to feel good about itself and to know in which direction it is moving. Reflecting many years afterwards on Labour’s landslide victory in 1945, Clement Attlee said: “We were looking towards the future. The Tories were looking towards the past.”
Labour wins well when its leader seems most in tune with the times and can speak for and to the people about who they are and what they want to be in the near future: Attlee in 1945, Wilson in 1966, Blair in 1997.
Miliband does not have a compelling personal story to tell the electorate, as Thatcher did about her remarkable journey from the grocer’s shop in Grantham and the values that sustained her along the way or Alan Johnson does about his rise from an impoverished childhood in west London. I went to Oxford to study PPE, worked for Gordon Brown, became a cabinet minister and then leader of the party does not quite do it. None of this would matter were Miliband in manner and approach not so much the product of this narrow background.
He understands and has analysed astutely capitalism’s destructive potential but not perhaps its resilience and ability to absorb shocks. As Lenin said, there are no “absolutely hopeless situations” for capitalism, as we are again discovering. There are deep problems for Labour and for all social-democratic parties that transcend any one leader. But as we enter an unstable era of multiparty politics, the fragmentation of the British state and intensifying Euroscepticism, Miliband’s chief problem is not policy but tone. He needs to find a distinctive voice to articulate people’s feelings about the present moment. And he might have to accept before long – or the electorate will force him to – that Europe’s social-democratic moment, if it ever existed, is fading into the past.
