By Steve Hynd
Ed Milliband has won the UK Labour Party's leadership election with 50.6% of the vote, narrowly beating his brother David. The New Statesman describes him as an "unambiguously social democratic leader" and certainly his bid was supported by all the right Lefties: Neil Kinnock, Tony Benn, the unions and of course his old ally Gordon Brown. David had the support of the majority of MPs, Ed the support of the grassroots party.
The conservative Telegraph writes:
David, 45, was the establishment candidate. A close ally of Tony Blair from the earliest days of New Labour he worked for him in opposition from 1994 and headed the No 10 policy unit during New Labour�s first term in power.
...By contrast Ed Miliband, at the age of 40 the younger of the two, presented himself as the �change� candidate who would end the New Labour era of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
He appealed to rank-and-file party members and sought to distance himself from the New Labour years and toxic issues such as the Iraq War, for which his brother had voted.
And with Labour neck-and-neck with the Conservative/Liberal-Democrat coalition in the polls, the only Labour-supporting tabloid in the UK, the Daily Mirror, quoted one of the union leaders who backed Ed over David on what they expect from the new leader:
His election has been welcomed by the Unite union, whose joint leader Tony Woodley hailed it as a "clear sign that the party wants change".
Mr Woodley called on the party to unite behind the new leadership. "We welcome Ed's victory - this is a fantastic achievement for him and for the policies he has been promoting.
"His victory, coming from nowhere a few months ago, is a clear sign that the party wants change, to move on from New Labour and reconnect with working people. Ed has won by hitting the issues people care about - stopping the assassination of public services, fighting for a living wage, standing up for manufacturing, a better future for young people. Now the party must unite behind its new leadership and take the fight to the Tories."
On foreign policy, Ed can be expected to be a vocal advocate for strong policy on climate change, will push to have the status of Britain's nuclear deterrent examined in the next defense review and support reconciliation with the Taliban as the major plank of an Afghan exit strategy. He is against the Israeli blockade on Gaza and believes that the "Palestinian people have the right to a state with internationally recognised borders". He is less likely to blindly follow the US into further adventurism abroad than his brother or Tony Blair.
Brother David will obviously take a key shadow-cabinet role and have great influence, but Ed won over the party's grassroots on issues not unfamiliar to US lefties. It appears that, in the UK at least, the age of Blairist neoliberal triangulation is dead.
However, that leftward step is a British response to conservatives allying themselves with a more centrist party. In the US, as conservative politics keeps moving further rightward, it seems likely that Obama's centrist traingulation won't follow the Blairism that inspired it into history just yet...more's the pity.
Given the unending string of bad news I'll take this as a hopeful sign. The victory of David Milliband would have been truly depressing. This, as you point out, seems to indicate a leftward shift of the political establishment. Nothing even remotely like that seems to be on our horizon. But, we can be happy for the Brits.
ReplyDelete