Party conference season JULIA LANGDON
Labour isn’t working again
Ed Miliband carefully avoided making any major policy announcements at the Labour Party conference this week. The decision was symptomatic of the political impotence still felt by the party since its general-election defeat last year
T
he day may yet come when some poor politics student who is short of an original subject to study will set about the business of analysing party
slogans. It will be a very dull task because they are all, almost without exception, false constructs of a selection of newly washed words as clean and meaningless as the soap powder advertising from which they appar- ently derive. I had thought that the slogan
for this week’s Labour conference in Liverpool was “New Politics: Fresh Ideas” because there were plenty of banners to this effect and it seemed to conform to the formula: combining four nice, bright, sparkling words with a look towards the future (“fresh”) and a flick towards the past (“new”, as in “New Labour”). As it turned out, this was quite wrong and the slo- gan was “Fulfilling the Promise of Britain”. It is not clear whether the slogan was chosen
(or, more likely, devised by an advertising agency at some enormous sum) before Ed Miliband started work on his conference speech, thus giving him a theme to coordinate his ideas, or whether he and his speech-writers looked at the pre-conference plans and realised that this was just the sort of nebulous phrase that would provide him with an excel- lent peroration. It doesn’t matter either way, any more than did most of the content of his speech, which was like the words of most political slogans and therefore designed not to offend anybody. We are in the land here of motherhood and apple pie. The surest test is to consider who would – who could possibly – oppose anything that the Labour leader had to say? Not a jot! Not a tittle! Do we not all approve of the National Health Service, of good companies and kindly neighbours, and do we not also all disapprove of bad banks, antisocial behaviour and people who purport to be providing nursing care but are actually selling all our grannies for a fast buck? If we are Conservatives, we might not like all that he had to say about David Cameron and his Government or, as Liberals, we might find his weak jokes about Nick Clegg less than side-splitting. But even so there was not really anything at all with which any of us might profoundly disagree. This has to be because of where the Labour
Party finds itself today, just over a year after the worst election defeat that anyone alive can remember. The political situation for them is dire. Contrary to some suggestions that have been aired by Labour loyalists in the last week, party members know exactly why that election was lost, how badly their leaders squandered the opportunities of 13 years in office and how much time and temper was wasted on irrelevant in-fighting instead of – well, instead of perhaps fulfilling the promise of Britain. Now they are looking at a Conservative-led coalition, which, within a single year, has had little hesitancy in unpick- ing such threads of the economic canvas as the Labour Government had managed to weave. All this and an ongoing economic crisis that broke while Labour was still in power
12 | THE TABLET | 1 October 2011
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