Ed Miliband has dismissed as ‘nonsense’ reports that several Labour MPs want to get rid of him as leader. But there is no doubt that many in his party feel deep alarm about its electoral prospects, about Mr Miliband’s ability to organise an effective opposition and about his dire personal poll ratings. Few voters, it seems, regard him as having what it takes to be prime minister. So should he go and if he won’t should his party make him?
One of the stories that fed the frenzy was a report carried by the BBC and endorsed by journalists in several newspapers that two unnamed Labour MPs had gone to the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party to say that Mr Miliband should resign. This followed a meeting of the 2010 intake of Labour MPs at which the inadequacy of the leadership was said to have been discussed. A group of Labour MPs from the north-west of England was also reported not only to have questioned the leadership this week but to have become so apprehensive about the party’s standing in their region that they feared the best they could hope for was to cling on to their seats rather than try to make further gains.
This growing feeling of alarm in the PLP goes back to the party conference in September where the mood was anything but that of a party confidently expecting to be returned to government at the general election next May. Mr Miliband’s own speech flopped and his failure even to mention immigration or the government’s fiscal deficit was widely condemned. When he explained that he had simply ‘forgotten’, criticism turned to derision.
Since then Labour MPs have watched their position get even worse. The party’s poll lead over the Conservatives has largely disappeared and one recent poll had support for the party fall to 29%, the dismal figure it managed to secure at the last election And that was the second worst in its history. Some Labour MPs have taken comfort in the calculation that the combination of an electoral system with a built-in advantage for Labour plus reliance on the loyalty of its core vote would see the party back into government. But others question whether their core vote is anything like as strong as they thought it was. They see it being eroded by both the Greens and, even more, UKIP. One frontbencher told the Financial Times: ‘There is no limit to how low we can go’.
Perhaps the most alarming development of all is what is going on in Scotland. Despite losing the independence referendum, the Scottish National Party is carrying all before it – and at the expense of the Labour party. A recent poll put the SNP 17% points ahead of Labour, enough to threaten most of the 41 seats Labour holds in Scotland. Without holding on to these, Labour has no chance of winning power at Westminster next May.
Of course these problems cannot be attributed solely to the merits or otherwise of its leader: even the most popular leader would be facing difficulties. But Mr Miliband’s problem is that he consistently polls even worse than his party. A recent poll rated him less popular than Nick Clegg, something many Labour MPs would not have imagined possible. And it is for this reason that the general alarm within the party about where it is heading is focused on the leader.
One of the MPs who was reported to have told the PLP chairman that Mr Miliband should go said: ‘He has close to zero support in the party. Colleagues are depressed because they don’t think he’s up to the job’.
What is striking is that those turning against Mr Miliband are not just those who never supported him in the first place. The Labour-supporting magazine, the New Statesman, backed him for the leadership in 2010 but published a sharp criticism of him this week. It said he had ‘failed to find an authentic voice to connect with the electorate’. The editor, Jason Cowley, said: ‘Miliband is very much an old-style Hampstead socialist. He doesn’t really understand the lower middle class or material aspiration. He doesn’t understand Essex Man or Woman. Politics for him must seem at times like an extended PPE seminar: elevated talk about political economy and good society.’
Mr Miliband’s problem is that few are willing to put a counter case, arguing his merits. While many in the Labour Party acknowledge that he achieved what no other Labour leader managed after a massive electoral defeat, namely to keep the party from tearing itself apart, almost no one is claiming that he has the leadership qualities needed to inspire mass support. The former chairman of the PLP, Lord Soley, said he needed to articulate a vision of the sort of Britain he wanted to create. John Mann, a Labour MP, said he needed to find a ‘cutting edge’.
With such widespread disillusion about his leadership, what should the party do? For those convinced that the party cannot win under him, the best solution would be for him voluntarily to fall on his sword. But that is vanishingly unlikely. Indeed the facts point in a different direction. This week he engaged in a mini-reshuffle, strengthening the position of loyal people around him, or ‘circling the wagons’, as one party official put it.
But equally there is no sign of any organised conspiracy to get rid of him: two MPs complaining anonymously to the PLP chairman certainly does not constitute a plot. It has been reported that two possible successors, the shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, and the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, have had discussions with each other about a post-Miliband world, but both strongly deny it.
And anyway, there is no obvious successor. Many Labour supporters speak longingly of the former Home Secretary (and former postman), Alan Johnson as a leader who could reconnect the party with its traditional grassroots, but he has consistently ruled himself out. He’s on record as saying he wouldn’t be up to the job of prime minister.
So, for the time being at least, those at the top of the party seem to have little alternative than to call for unity. That’s what Douglas Alexander, the party’s election co-ordinator, said on Friday. The party needed to ‘pull together’ because ‘divided parties lose elections’.
But unless the party’s fortunes improve in the six months left before the election, that may not be enough to stop the disillusionment with Mr Miliband turning into outright rebellion.
So what should Labour do? Should they try to get rid of Mr Miliband or soldier on under him? Or have his critics got it wrong? Have they under-estimated his strength and will he prove them all wrong next May?
What’s your view? Let us know.
Image:PA
