Though Cowards Flinch

Having come out in support of Ed Balls’ Labour leadership bid, I find it incumbent upon me also to take on the role of campaign manager.  

In this guise, I can now announce Ed’s 10 point plan for winning the Labour leadership election when he gets back from holiday.  Ed’s support team is required to take note and draw up a detailed action plan in time for his return. 

A number of the points will also assist Ed Miliband, who is currently my recommended second choice on the ballot sheet (I am not constrained in the same way as Ed Balls from providing this guidance on other preferences).

Ed Balls’ 10 point plan

1) Ed will openly acknowledge that both his robust stance on BSF/Academies and his narrative around the Coalition’s cuts have made him more popular with left-leaning Labour members than many had thought would be the case at the start of the campaign. 

While he will not ‘court’ the leftwing vote as such, he will be seen to be pleased that lefties are getting behind him, and to describe this in appropriately humble terms as a ‘turn up for the books’, given the revulsion that many of those same members have felt for his part in the ‘New Labour project’. 

He will also accept gracefully the fact that, while some left wingers are moving towards him on the basis of his recent track record in opposition, others with fairly similar leftwing views cannot bring themselves to see any value in his candidature because of his part in New Labour’s track record while in government.  

He should note that this produces a somewhat strange state of affairs whereby some left wingers are considering him as number one on the ballot sheet, while others will put him at the bottom of the list.

2) Ed will accept with grace the current verdict of many Labour members that he may make a very good leader of the opposition, but has a long way to go before he can be thought of as a future Prime Minister, if ever. 

He will pick up on the argument that the jobs are very different, and go about emphasising his suitability for the opposition role. 

He will also develop the argument that the public may react well to a Labour party strategy of selecting a potential PM around a year out from a general election, while retaining the right to move straight into the PM job if he is part of a movement which brings down the Coalition or the Tories earlier than 2015.  This argument will indeed go down well with the public, who will see in both due humility and a commitment to tackling the Coalition’s excesses over and above ‘preparing for government’ at what, for many people, is a very distant point in the future.

3) Ed will talk openly about this leadership campaign has not just been an opportunity to display his talents to the membership and the wider public, but how it has also been a genuine learning opportunity for himself, it being the first time in many years that he has not been bound by loyalty to New Labour. 

He will suggest strongly that this learning experience has helped him rediscover elements of socialist thinking that he had lost during the later 1990s and 2000s.

He will make clear that he is recognising distinction between the ‘listening to members’, mantra  adopted by all candidates, and taking on board what they say and adjusting his actions and ideas accordingly after a period of reflection (see als 4 and 5 where he should evidence this).

4) He will fulfil his promise, made in this early campaign contribution:

It would be an irony if, having said the Party needs to listen more and open up, that I then offered my own detailed prescription and asked members if they agree with it.

I want to hear from party members and supporters about how we should improve this process. Over the summer I will publish more details on how we could do this through my campaign website.

In so doing, Ed will almost certainly be differentiating himself from the other candidates, who to have a very large extent’ ‘been there, done that’ in respect of intra-party democracy, and have moved on to other areas of their campaign.  This show of reflexivity will stand Ed in good stead with many members, especially on the Left, who are acutely aware that there is a good deal of talk about openness in policy making, but little other than tokenism (e.g. an elected party chair) when it comes to concrete promises.

Ed will therefore be very specific about how we will engage with the NEC to revise the core financial flows which dictate much party and related union activity, and thereby ensure that a genuine ‘bottom up ‘ approach to party organisation is embedded within it.

He will follow my specific guidance on this, in keeping with an explicit promise made to me to ‘reflect’ on what I had to say before I became his campaign manager.

5) He should acknowledge openly, as an example of this learning, that he was wrong in his comments on immigration at the start of the campaign, and that by listening to members  – especially those to the left of him – he recognises that he has himself become prey to the right-wing media narrative about immigration. 

He should set out precisely in what way he was wrong, what brought him to say such things about immigration policy, and set out clearly an alternative message.  He should do this mostly because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is tactically astute in its appeal to the left of the party (see 1 above), a possible unexpected source of votes.

6) Ed will continue to differentiate his approach to the ‘deficit issue’ from the other candidates, and do his utmost to articulate what makes his economic policy preferable to that of his candidates. 

In this, he will build on his recent acknowledgment that the Labour’s pre-election plans for spending cuts were wrong, by setting out precisely, and using his media presence to do so numerically, why we do not need cuts now, and the extent to which the Tories are lying about the ‘necessity’ for cuts.

He will develop an aggressive counter-narrative to the Tories ‘debt crisis’ claims, by invoking MMT/post-Keynesian theory where necessary, in order to start to portray the Tories as liars and cheats when it comes to economic fundamentals.

In particular, he will build on the lessons from this post by Duncan Weldon, as well as the comments that follow (from Vimothy and Duncan) about the need to adopt radical economic logic as part of a socialist counter-narrative.

He will also be gracious in acknowledging the contribution of David Miliband to the debate about how Labour develops an alternative political economy, in recognition that while D Miliband remains wrong on deficit reduction, and bound by New Labour’s orthodoxies, he does have something valuable to say about industrial and ‘real growth’ policy.

7) Ed will deal directly with the Iraq question.  He will stop trying to avoid the issue by saying that he wasn’t in parliament at that time, and acknowledge simply that New Labour got this disastrously wrong, with terrible consequences.

He will not stop, however, with a show of guilt, for this in itself achieves little.  Having acknowledged that New Labour not only betrayed the Iraqi people, but also wilfully ignored its own membership (which left in droves) he will seek to link the whole failure back to the lack of democratic openness within the party, and set out plans to develop accountability structures, which allow the membership to restrain its leadership where necessary.

The objective he will set out here will be nothing less than to establish the Labour party membership as one of two organs – the other being parliament - to which future Labour governments will report, but by which their actions can be restrained.  Only by submitting to such arrangements, Ed will argue, will the leadership regain the trust of the party.

8) Ed will talk consciously of ‘resistance’ to the Tories’ cuts (and other abuses like that proposed for public housing).  In so doing he will distinguish himself as a proper leader of the opposition party, not simply as a MP-long-time-in-waiting.

He will actively encourage Labour members to join with other resistance movements developing, and not to become too sucked into the Labour party’s internal affairs, and to the electoral successes that will come soon enough in local government.

Ed will consciously and openly advocate the move of the party away from its New Labour role as ‘electoral machine’ towards a renewed role at the heart of the Labour movement. 

Five years in opposition is too long a time to be preparing for government.  If the party is to be trusted in five years, then it must show what it is made of now, by being at the heart of the resistance, acknowledging that it is only part of that struggle, but an integral part all the same.

Ed will use his image, already developed, as a ‘fighter’ to get that message over, with a promise that he’ll be at the head anti-cuts marches, and working actively with anti-cuts groups. on the kind of holistic strategy set out here by his new campaign manager.

9) Ed will answer my interview questions in full, and gain a good deal of credit from TCF influential readership for doing so, especially as it looks as though all the other candidates are reneging on their promises.

10) Ed and his team will join West Lancashire Labour activists in the last week of August/early September as we set about battering the Tories in two byelections caused by the untimely deaths of two local councillors.

This is my 10 point plan for Ed Balls’ success.  If he follows it well, he will win. 

If he doesn’t, he will incur my wrath.