Ed Miliband must be more courageous, says Peter Mandelson

Architect of New Labour expresses concern over pace of progress in development of a coherent party ideology Ed Miliband needs to be more courageous so that he cannot be seen as a leader of factions inside the party, Peter Mandelson, the former cabinet minister and architect of New Labour has warned. He also called on him to take more risks and for the party to produce a coherent policy review that addressed the big issues facing the country, including public services in an era of austerity. Speaking to a seminar at the Labour pressure group Progress, Mandelson reflected some of the frustration at the pace of the party’s attempts to find a voice since the general election, and appeared to admit that Miliband has yet to prove himself. He said “Our leader is a leader of the country, not of the party’s sections and factions, and it is to the country he needs to be given the space to prove himself. The leadership election is over. We support Ed. No ifs and buts. He is our leader, period”. He warned that infighting in any party is deeply corrosive, saying it “all but killed Labour in the eighties”. He also appeared to express a concern at the perception of the party’s wider leadership, saying: “We have to sound and look like a genuinely national party drawn from every region and social background, and not just ex-political assistants, researchers and trade union apparatchiks recruited from inside the London beltway”. He expressed concern at the pace of progress, saying the party currently appears “too tactical, too afraid to answer questions that would trigger difficulty in the party or how the media will report it.” He added: “We need to spend less time talking to ourselves about Ed and more time talking to the country with smart ideas that are realistic and sufficiently innovative to command media and public attention”. He urged Miliband to take a few risks, talk directly to the country and innovate on policy challenges. There is also concern that the party’s policy review may prove to be fragmented without a coherent overall ideology. Mandelson said “the party needed to realign our instincts and outlook with those of the British people”. He argued that “the lesson from the 80s and the pre-1997 is this renewal has to be done as a coherent whole if we are to be sure that policies fit with the aspirations and outlook of the British people. He said that in a whole swath of areas Labour need to be clearer about the need for responsibility and the overlap between the state and the individual. “Rights coming with responsibility is an eternal verity of our party,” Mandelson said, arguing this principle could be applied to issues such as antisocial behaviour, health, cultural integration and sexualisation of children. A key task for the party, he said, was how to continue to improve public services and lever up productivity. He said this was “a huge challenge now the economy is not growing. People will not support further tax and spend unless they can see clear value for money”. “Further enlarging public sector employment is not an option in the coming decade and we need to look to the real economy, to the private business sector, to deliver sufficient numbers of decently paid skilled jobs.” He said the party itself needed to go through radical reform. He said the party needed to revolutionise its funding sources, saying “we cannot let this situation persist.” Mandelson insisted this was not a coded attack on the unions, admitting the party could not exist without them, but added: “We have to develop smarter ways of raising money. We have to combine the latest solutions with community engagement to open up new sources of cash.” “We have to go where the public are, having allowed ourselves to drift away from them in the last few years of our government. People take their politics from the issues they care about – jobs and unemployment, immigration and asylum, health and the NHS, schools, cost of living, pensions and poverty. In these issues people find meaning to their policy”. Ed Miliband Peter Mandelson Labour Trade unions Party funding Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 20, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.