ANALYSIS:Few opposition leaders have got good reviews this far from an election, but few have got worse, writes MARK HENNESSY,London Editor
LABOUR LEADER Ed Miliband gave no quarter to his MPs when he spoke to them at the weekly parliamentary party meeting: the party, he said, faced a battle to restore its economic credibility.
Many of those before him were unhappy, particularly since Miliband was now saying he would not – or could not – promise to reverse the cuts made by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition once Labour wins back power.
There has, in many respects, been a numbing predictability about Labour’s course since May 2010, when it lost power because the trust it had striven so hard to win from voters during the 1990s had gone.
Ignoring Macbeth’s declaration that “if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly”, Labour first denied that it had acted wrongly. This was followed by half-apologies couched with self-regard and declarations that others had made mistakes too.
Throughout, a half-interested – at best – British public looked on unimpressed, leading Miliband and shadow chancellor Ed Balls to decide that they had to go further if they were to establish themselves with voters and be given the right to be heard.
The manner in which they have gone about it, however, is bizarre. Last week, Miliband held a new year leadership “relaunch”, one that left his audience struggling to identify his main points.
Days later, Balls gave an interview to the Guardian, followed hours later by a Fabian Society address that outlined Labour’s new orthodoxy: support for a public pay freeze and a warning that no guarantees could be given to reverse the cuts made.
Many MPs, who were not given notice if this, are furious, while the unions – Labour’s paymasters now that the millionaires beloved by Tony Blair have long disappeared – have warned they may cut the purse strings.
It is unclear why Miliband did not lay out the ground, rather than Balls, and whether the content of Balls’s speech was influenced by the negative reaction to his leader’s new year thoughts.
Len McCluskey, the leader of the Unite union, which provides a quarter of all Labour’s income, warned that the party was on course for electoral disaster, while GMB leader Paul Kenny rang Labour headquarters to voice his displeasure.
If Miliband was on stronger ground, the idea of a Miliband-versus-the-unions-type clash would be manna from heaven for a man who won the leadership only because of union support, having failed to win the support of a majority of the party membership or MPs.
But even now, Miliband has failed to identify a clear space for himself, since the central tenets of the party’s new position – that the cuts are too deep and too fast but, nevertheless, could not be reversed – will prove difficult, if not impossible, to explain.
In Labour’s election manifesto, it promised to halve the UK’s structural deficit by 2015, compared to the government’s post-election pledge to eliminate it entirely. Today, faced with a tougher world, British chancellor George Osborne now bids to do so by 2017.
Osborne’s strategy, Labour says, has sucked the life out of the British economy, cutting tax receipts and increasing the welfare benefit bill. However, Labour is only half right, since income taxes are, in fact, up, while the welfare bill is an extra £1.5 billion (€1.8 billion).
Despite his problems, Miliband remains calm – “Zen-like”, say some. He has set the terms of the debate on some issues: for noting the need for a more responsible capitalism, and for identifying the fears of Britain’s middle class with his first-derided and now copied “squeezed middle” tag.
However, Miliband has failed to make progress from there, while some voters cannot get over his looks, his voice, or the fact that the only thing they know about him is that he shafted his brother David to get the job.
So far, he does not face a leadership challenge, and Labour will be reluctant to have one.
Few leaders of the opposition have got good reviews this far from an election, it is true. The difficulty for Miliband, however, is that few have got worse.