Ed Miliband: Labour's got talent, not a leadership plot

Is Ed Miliband about to resign as Labour Party leader? Not having sacrificed so much to achieve this status, no. Is he to be forced out? His position would be made untenable if enough Labour MPs publicly call for him to. But we are long way from this. There seem to be plenty of grumbling Labour MPs but no organised conspiracy. Do debates about his future as party leader weaken him? Undoubtedly, yes.

Labour’s behaviour, therefore, risks the worst of all worlds: diminishing without defenestrating the party leader. Especially with a leader so hobbled, there is a case to be made for an alternative leader—with Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Alan Johnson being the most likely—being able to make a better fist of building a Labour majority. But as Rob Marchant has explained on Labour Uncut, the practical obstacles to a leadership challenge are considerable. Another way of looking at Burnham, Cooper and Johnson is to say that Labour is a team blessed with numerous plausible leaders. Only parties lacking talent are not in this position.

Labour’s got talent. Not just MPs capable of prodigiously tweeting about the TV show with a similar name. It doesn’t have an organised conspiracy against its leader. Nor does it have time to waste between now and the general election only six months away on a destructive deliberation on whether it does or not. Labour has enough challenges to overcome without unnecessarily adding to them.

The leading left-wing blog, Labour Uncut, of which I am Deputy Editor, has been unambiguous in how we see these challenges. As Atul Hatwal has noted, since 2011 we’ve posted the best part of 100 articles warning that unless the fundamentals on leadership and the economy are tackled and Labour moves back to the centre, as the election draws near, the poll lead will evaporate and crisis will engulf the party.

My latest attempt to show how the party might improve its standing on the economy is in the current Progress magazine. There remains time before the general election to strengthen Labour’s polling on the economy. Labour’s talent should be deployed to this task, not background carping that deepens the other challenge that confronts the party: turning around Miliband’s leadership ratings.

As much as I have been among those urging Labour to do more to meet the challenges of leadership and the economy, Miliband remains Labour’s destiny. Making the best of this remains the most rational strategy. Given the positives that attach to Miliband’s Labour, this is a much less onerous task than it was to unite behind Gordon Brown in 2010.

Like most party members, I was frustrated by Brown’s leadership. Nonetheless, I was proud to stand as a Labour candidate in 2010 in the Cumbrian constituency of Westmorland and Lonsdale, which was ultimately won by Liberal Democrat President  Tim Farron. I did my utmost to articulate the positives that Labour then offered. If it was possible to be convincingly optimistic about Labour in 2010, it is eminently more so now.

We’ll wait a long time for government ministers to talk as much sense on the EU as Pat McFadden. Or to rebuke the nastiness of Ukip as wholeheartedly as Chuka Umunna. And as Conservative modernisation recedes to distant memory, it is Labour MPs who have worked with Policy Network to publish a collection of essays that confidentially looks to the future.

Of course, Labour could go further in addressing the challenges that face the party, and which Labour Uncut have highlighted. But the likes of McFadden and Umunna attest to the depth and breadth of talent available to Labour in attempting this. This talent is more than adequate to expose the serial incompetence of the government. The government’s failure to close the deficit, reduce immigration and implement universal credit means that they are failing against the benchmarks that they set themselves in key areas of public concern.

Britain can do better than this, as Miliband repeatedly insisted in his 2013 conference speech. But it will need Labour government to do so. That variety of government is only going to be available for the foreseeable future under Miliband’s leadership. This leadership and the party’s MPs and activists urgently need to make the best of this political reality.