If Labour wants to get elected, its thinktanks should think again
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Version 0 of 1. I sympathise with party leaders. They get daily criticism, personal scrutiny, abuse and exhaustion, and they must put up with those pains in the backside, thinktanks. Labour's Ed Miliband is today savaged in a letter to the Guardian by "an alliance of thinktanks on the party's left and centre right". After a weekend of polls showing his lead over the Tories near vanishing, the letter sets a new low in party loyalty. More to the point, it says nothing. The lofty gurus of Compass, Progress, Class, Act and the Fabians are moved to tell Miliband that Britain faces "unprecedented" challenges. Democracy seems "pretty" irrelevant, and the country needs "transformative change". It is apparently "time people had the power". It reads like a spoof leaflet for a student demo. The gurus want a Labour manifesto based on accountability, devolution, co-production and the "prevention of the causes of our social, environmental, physical and mental health problems". They require a "holistic and long-term approach". They give no indication what this means. We end up crying, where are the hubs, the sustainables, the renewables, the iconic delivery mechanisms? The collective noun for thinktanks is a vacuity. The one thing a leader might ask of his intellectuals in return for their anticipated peerages is stuff he can use. The Tories are gapingly weak on NHS morale, local democracy, mansion taxes, rural conservation, not to mention everything to do with foreign and defence policy. Labour seems tongue-tied on them all. An effective opposition has to deploy specifics, not platitudes. That said, Tony Blair's peculiar skill in 1997 was to adopt virtually the entire prospectus of his Thatcherite opponents, and yet seem fresh, new and, above all, united. He had barely a policy to call the name. It is probable that nothing Miliband says on the policy front will influence voters come the ballot. Governments lose elections, and his task is to avoid the Kinnock trap of failing to seem a plausible prime minister to the nation. This spat is evidence that he has some way to go, even to seem plausible to his own ranks. British parties are oligarchies and Miliband is losing the confidence of his oligarchs. He must either win it back or show them the smack of discipline. Perhaps he should pack them off to marginal seats to lick envelopes and tramp doorsteps. Let's see how holistic and sustainable they are when they return. |