Ed Miliband still struggles to bridge the believability gap

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/23/miliband-attempts-bridge-believability-gap

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Since Ed Miliband became Labour leader he has faced two competing demands: to inspire and to reassure. His party has craved a message of upheaval, a vision of the bold tomorrow. But he has struggled to get to tomorrow because he also needs to address the doubts of those who resent the Labour government of yesterday.

This has been Miliband’s dilemma: how to be an emblem of hope for the future when so much energy must be spent making peace with the past. Resolving the tension was the purpose of his speech to this year’s annual conference. It contained a few new policies – more money for the NHS, provided by taxes on mansions, hedge funds and big tobacco. But Miliband knows policies are not the missing ingredient. There have already been promises of lower bills, higher wages and a well-funded NHS.

The problem has been twofold. First, that the list of pledges hasn’t coalesced into a message with emotional potency. Second, that voters aren’t persuaded Labour can deliver the goods in practice.

On the first problem, Miliband sought to weave the different elements not just into a single strand but into a single word, “together”: shared resources and solidarity as the antidote to a Conservatism that leaves people to fend for themselves. To deal with the second problem, Miliband set out The Plan: six concrete goals encompassing, among other things, the environment, home-ownership and living costs, reaching a decade beyond the next election. As a student of Barack Obama’s campaigns, Miliband knows that change in itself is an empty promise. The White House was won with the slogan “change you can believe in”. The “believability gap” is something Miliband’s team has been fretting over in private. Closing it was the job of his speech.

The difficulty is captured in Labour’s angst since the Scottish referendum. The party was on the winning side and yet around the conference fringe there has been palpable envy of the yes campaign. Labour party members have no truck with nationalism but recognise that many Scots were motivated by something else – a loss of faith in British politics so profound that starting a new country, whatever the risk, felt like the only hope. That urgency appeals to the revolutionary soul of a Labour conference and to a lot of Labour voters more than the safety-first message that dominated the no campaign.

But no won. Alex Salmond failed to neutralise anxiety about the economic viability of independence. He fell through a believability gap, and something like the attack on the credibility of the yes campaign is heading Labour’s way from the Tories. David Cameron will seek to recast Miliband’s offer of big change as a reckless gamble. Big businesses will repeat the message; much of the press will amplify it.

Labour’s defence is to make sure the numbers add up. Miliband and Ed Balls are determined that the Tories will not be able to claim Labour’s plan is built on rash borrowing. That upsets trade union leaders who think there is no room for hope on a shrunken platform of fiscal caution. The riposte from the leadership is that the distinction between voters who respond to spending sobriety and those who want drastic alternatives is false. They are often the same people. Budget discipline is the solid runway from which the loftier rhetoric of hope and change might soar.

But here Labour has another problem, which is that Miliband personally struggles to represent the idea of renewal. His self-image as a radical bears no resemblance to his image in much of the country as an identikit establishment politician. There are Labour figures who think their leader is naive to think he can pose as an insurgent. “That role was never available to a former Treasury adviser who was in government only four years ago,” one senior shadow cabinet minister says.

That concern includes doubts that Miliband truly understands the anti-politics forces swirling around him. He believes surges in Scottish nationalism and Nigel Farageism are displaced anger caused by the way Britain’s economy is skewed to favour the rich and rip off the rest. Fixing the structure is meant to unblock the sluices of social justice and wash away the rage. Many MPs and shadow ministers fear that isn’t so – that it’s about much more than economics.

This is where the leadership’s reluctance to engage with the question of “English votes for English laws”, foisted on to the agenda by the Tories after the Scotland vote, causes disquiet. Miliband refused to be blown off course. The guidance to the shadow cabinet was: “Hunker down, hold the line, ride it out.” Miliband’s aides insisted they could get the conversation back to Labour’s preferred topics. Low pay and the NHS would trump the West Lothian question over time. Dealing with English constitutional grievance was not in the plan but, as Mike Tyson once said: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

It isn’t as if no one in Labour has thought about the politics of Englishness and how not to surrender it to the Tories and Ukip. John Denham, once a close Miliband adviser, and Jon Cruddas, head of the party policy review, have been pestering the leader on the subject for years. There were warnings that it would blow up after the referendum so the lacklustre response has baffled MPs. “This was such an opportunity for us, we should be running towards it,” says one frontbencher.

The episode exposed an old weakness in the Miliband operation: it lacks agility; it is slow to respond to sudden changes in the political temperature. In interviews the leader has difficulty emoting instinctively on unfamiliar issues: when he doesn’t have a policy answer, he can’t improvise around the question. But the greater concern is that the shift in temperature is a symptom of political climate change and that Miliband, with his attachment to rational economic analysis, is not adapting. His speech had substance and moments of passion to get his party’s pulse up a beat, but Labour won’t easily shake off its feeling of running behind change, not shaping it.

Even in the comfort zone of its annual conference, where mansion-owners and hedge funds are made to pay for the NHS, Labour doesn’t look comfortable any more. Miliband’s plan is to show that he can offer both radical change and a steady hand on the tiller. The case was sturdy, the performance accomplished. Yet even the safest pair of hands shakes when the political ground underfoot is moving.