The media obsession with Ed Miliband’s leadership qualities is diverting attention away from the truly radical nature of some of his emerging policies.
A speech delivered to an invited audience of London Citizens on 10th January 2012 may have hammered home the austere – and somewhat uninspiring - message of “fairness in tough times”, but in-between the hair-shirt rhetoric a few radical diamonds glinted.
When he says “We will be a different party”, he really means it. Despite all the focus on tackling childhood poverty under Blair and Brown, inequality grew, to the shame of many on the left. Miliband argues that this was because fairness wasn’t “hard-wired into our economy”. He’s talking about structural reform, not just tinkering at the edges with tax benefits.
It made me think of Plato’s ‘Republic’ and the assertion that true reform to the state never comes through the treatment of symptoms alone, but through genuinely radical change – change at the root. It was a truth Blair came to understand too late, as he admits in his memoirs.
What Miliband is hinting at remains tantalising elusive, but can be divined in attitudes towards corporate pay and the desire to see employee representation on remuneration committees and pay linked towards long-term, not short-term, corporate performance. It can be seen in aspirations towards mutuality of ownership and an end to what he calls “vested interests” – a coy expression for monopolies, cartels and unfettered, exploitative capitalism.
The individual citizen’s democratic influence has been diminished by the overweening power of global markets and corporations that are apparently accountable to no-one, despite acting against our national interest at times.
The message I discern is that there needs to be a fundamental realignment of power from the boardroom back to the citizen. His continued support for the community organising charity London Citizens (now Citizens UK), which is busy ‘reweaving the fabric of civil society’ from the grassroots upwards, gives weight to this view.
Miliband’s vision is emerging gradually - frustratingly slowly for some (Lord Glasman writing in the New Statesman, for example). But as I listened to his speech in the Oxo Tower I craved more vibrant, optimistic language and some indications of an economic growth strategy moving beyond the simplistic five-point plan, which includes the barely credible tax on bankers’ bonuses. Yes, VAT cuts make sense in a consumer economy requiring a boost to confidence, but we still lack a really big, bold idea to capture the electorate’s imagination.
In his quest for fairness Miliband cannot allow himself to be branded as anti-business or anti-enterprise. Capitalism is not the enemy. We need a more human capitalism wedded to a commitment to social justice.
