Ed Miliband's summer speech: Soundbites against soundbites

The room was remarkably full 30 minutes before Ed Miliband arrived, audience bubbling, smooth yet unassuming music plupping over the PA system. The room was set up for a performance in the round, concentric circles of seats arranged about a central arena of floor, in the middle of which stood a spindly metal table, and on it three full glasses of water. It was a hot day and the large windows at the side of the room were open.

“I went canvassing the other day with Glenda in Dartmouth Park Road,” said a voice. “I could barely keep up with her.”

The crowd was of Labour activists, and they were a variegated collection of old, young, white and black. It was the start of Labour’s summer push, of the big kick-off to send the party out of Westminster and into the outside world with a spring in its step, a job complicated somewhat by the recent slew of positive economic news. Yesterday, the IMF rated Britain’s economic growth rate as the fastest in the developed world, at 3.2 per cent, and on the day of the speech, the Office for National Statistics announced that the UK economy had finally recovered to above its 2008 pre-crash peak. These numbers are balm for the government, but are flies in the economic ointment for Labour—the proportions are heading towards one part ointment, two parts fly. The Labour response has been that living standards have not kept up with growth and the majority of people are not feeling the benefits of the economic recovery. In addition, weak productivity growth is keeping wages down and though GDP overall might be heading upwards, GDP per capita is still lagging its pre-crash level. The word on the economy most favoured by Labour is “complacency.” This is no time for complacency on the economy. But then when is it ever? The room waited, listening to Röyksopp.

The first speaker was Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Hampstead, Tulip Siddiq, niece of the Prime Minister of Bangladesh. Siddiq spoke about Ed, who was not yet in view, noting his “reflective” character, assuring the crowd that he was a “genuine” person. Ed is, Siddiq continued, a man of “true integrity” as happy talking to a 90-year-old about pensions as he is to a six-year-old about jelly babies. A “champion of equality” and someone you can “actually trust,” Siddiq then welcomed to the dais “the next Prime Minister, Ed Miliband.” The crowd stood and applauded as he strode to the centre of attention. 

“Friends, Tulip, thanks for that…” the applause died down and after a few opening remarks about the crisis in Gaza, he got into it: the launch of his “summer campaign,” one energised by the spectre of the four “failed years” of Coalition government. He referred in passing to the economy, but only to remind listeners in the room and also those watching via the many television cameras—and throughout the event, it was clear that the latter was his real audience—that the present recovery will not fix the long-term problems faced by the country. The Tories are for the few, not the many, he said, setting each word in place with the downward chop of a hand. “We are in a position,” he told the room and the cameras “to win the next general election.” The crowd applauded this statement of psephological fact: Labour is indeed in a strong electoral position. The polls, not least those conducted by YouGov, show Labour to be ahead of the Conservatives in voter intentions, albeit on the day of the speech by the narrow margin of 35-38 points. Still, Ed is correct. If you believe the polls, then he is heading for Downing Street next May.

Then his speech began to take an interesting turn. His biggest challenge, he said, was not the Conservative party. Pause. The room fell still. Even the journalists, packed into their small scribbling corner, stopped and looked up. No, said Ed. Not the Tories, but cynicism. “People say ‘you’re all the same’,” he said. The public sees politicians who prefer soundbites to policies, who shout at one another in PMQs, who prefer style over substance—politicians who are obsessed with “photo-op politics,” said Ed, in doing so providing a political soundbite that brilliantly skewered the modern fixation for political soundbites. It was a moment of high paradox, made all the more acute by the four huge boards that loomed at the far end of the room, each of them declaring “ONE NATION LABOUR.” He then launched himself at the Cameron jugular with that most deadly of rhetorical devices: self-deprecation. “Of course, image and pictures matter,” said Ed, “but I am not from central casting.” He even went on to acknowledge his resemblance to Wallace, the hapless animated model to whom Ed has been compared by unsympathetic commentators. “But,” he said, “there is more to politics than the photo-op.” Put me up against Cameron in the photo-op world and sure, he’s going to win, said Ed. But that’s not what I offer.

So what does he offer? “Big ideas.” “Ideas and deep thinking,” he said. He then, in one quick sentence ran through the subjects on which he did that deep thinking, among them: banks, housing, energy companies, Rupert Murdoch… He bemoaned the loss of empathy in British politics, as evidenced in policies such as the bedroom tax, going so far as to say that politics should have “soul”, the first time I have ever heard that word used in a political speech in Britain. He then followed up with a further attack on cynicism, before thundering to his concluding entreaty that the audience should “go out and show how we can change Britain.”

It was a strong speech, with some interesting turns and jokes, in which Ed tried to meet head-on the criticism of his personal style by jokily admitting his shortcomings. To distil the thing down to the bare minimum, his message was: I’m not great on camera, but I am very good at the ideas stuff. In the questions that followed, one of the audience said that talking about big ideas was very good, but: “what are the ideas?” An uneasy ripple went round the room. The questioner had not been a member of the press, but a Labour party activist. Ed replied that the big questions were about whether Britain wanted to be less equal as a society and most centrally “what kind of a country can we build?” These were two excellent questions, which drew approving nods from the audience—but they were questions. Not ideas.

There were further questions from the floor, including a furious volley of noise from Michael Crick of Channel 4, who demanded to know whether this change of emphasis from Ed in his presentational style was an admission that his previous approach had failed. The answer to this was less significant than the question.

Eventually the final applause came, Ed left the room and the crowd jammed the doorways, pondering a speech that had contained a direct appeal for the electorate to set aside their cynicism. To forget all about the unseemly shouting at PMQs and the expenses scandals and the political fratricide. Instead, the speech urged, concentrate on the ideas. It was the cri de coeur of the earnest politician, of the idealist who, in Ed’s own words, wants nothing more than to give people “the debate they deserve.”

It is an interesting view—that the thing people want most from politics is a debate. But debate is not most people’s experience of politics at all. It is how politicians and party activists experience it certainly, but really there is barely any political debate in Britain. Instead loud exchanges of views predominate, composed mainly of tribal party cant. The notion that across the country competing political concepts are being weighed and assessed, that a national political debate is talking place, is untrue. This is not to suggest that politics is somehow fixed. Game-changers do come along, Blair for example, who are capable of winning epochal victories of their own making. But Blair did so not by changing people’s minds through debate. He did it by moulding his party to suit the country whose approval he sought, a political method that recognised the essential truth about politics—about people also—that trying to change minds is almost always fruitless.

The jokes and references to bacon sandwiches were a good idea. Lance that wound and it will begin to heal. But the notion of Britain as one great debating chamber is a clear expression of the distance between Ed and the electorate. He may joke about his appearance, his mistakes and his character, but Ed’s instincts seem bound to take him further away from the electorate and not towards it.