NEWLY ELECTED Labour leader Ed Miliband sought to put distance between himself and trade union leaders, who played a significant role in his election, by declaring he would not support irresponsible strikes against multibillion-pound cuts which the coalition government is due to announce next month.
His speech was overshadowed by his brother David’s lack of public approval for the new leader’s declaration that Tony Blair had been “wrong” to invade Iraq. “War was not a last resort, because we did not build sufficient alliances and because we undermined the United Nations.”
Refusing to join the applause, the elder Miliband, who was foreign secretary from 2007, turned to Labour’s deputy leader, Harriet Harman, to complain, “Why are you clapping? You voted for it.” Replying, Ms Harman, who will stay on in her post and does not need to seek re-election, was seen to say, “I’m clapping because he’s leader and I’m supporting him.”
This has further fuelled speculation that David Miliband will not put forward his name for a place on Labour’s shadow cabinet.
Indeed, there is speculation he could quit politics altogether.
The new leader will have to decide who will fill shadow cabinet positions once the victors are known. Most attention will be focused on whom he chooses to shadow George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer.
Countering his portrayal as “Red Ed”, the new leader said Labour had to win the argument that the £115 billion cuts proposed over the next five years will damage British society: “We need to win the public to our case and what we must avoid at all costs is alienating them and adding to the book of historic union failures. That is why I will have no truck and you should have no truck with overblown rhetoric about waves of irresponsible strikes. The public won’t support them. I won’t support them. And you shouldn’t support them either.”
Mr Miliband repeatedly emphasised that Labour is now being led by “a new generation” and put distance between himself and the New Labour legacy left by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, even though he served as a special adviser from 1997, was an MP from 2005 and a cabinet minister from 2007 after Mr Brown took over. New Labour had been right to invest in schools and the National Health Service, to tackle poverty and crime, but it lost touch with millions of voters by its failure to understand concerns about immigration and other issues, he said. “The hard truth for all of us in this hall is that a party that started taking on old thinking became the prisoner of its own certainties.” Too often, he said it had looked like “a new establishment”.
Radical union leader Bob Crow, who represents RMT union railway workers, condemned Mr Miliband’s attitude to union protests against the cuts. “Any Labour leader who fails to support those workers in the frontline of defending jobs and services against the ConDem assault will get slaughtered at the polls.”