It's been a mixed couple of weeks for Ed Miliband. On one day he receives the cheers of a trade union audience, on another he insults the entire population of Liverpool. The Labour leader's determination to do the popular thing, regardless the inconsistencies or hypocrisies, is proving unhelpful to establishing a solid base of support for the party.
In a speech to the GMB trade union, Miliband certainly made all the right moves. He promised to tackle social insecurities, things like low pay, the lack of affordable housing and zero-hour contracts. But his most extraordinary move was to make the merest hint of a concession of the possibility that the railways aught to be renationalised. This earned him the most meagre of ovations (Wintour, 2014).
However, he did not get to enjoy his success with the trade union audience for very long. Just a day later, he followed the lead of other senior political figures in posing with The Sun's free special edition marking the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.
What he failed to consider was the reaction that posing with The Sun would provoke from his own MPs, from his party's own councillors in Liverpool and the groups representing the victims and survivors of the Hillsborough tragedy of 1989 (BBC, 2014). Miliband was roundly criticised by all of them for associating himself, for his own short-term polling benefit, with a publication that covered the tragedy so disgustingly disrespectfully and with an insulting bias (O'Carroll, 2012).
How can Miliband have been so completely on message for progressives one day, and so entirely out of touch the next?
The answer is that Ed Miliband's approach is to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It might be effective at creating 'brand awareness', or at making an average viewer think that their priorities are shared by the Party, but it buys those gains at the great cost of alienating many other groups. It trades substance, like the real, thought out policies, for simply being seen.
Such cynical tactics are pursued for one purpose alone: getting elected. From his first speech as Labour leader, Ed Miliband has made it clear that getting into government, and getting the power that comes with it, is his first priority for the party:
"Every day out of power, ... another day when we cannot change our country for the better."
It has been said before on this blog, that power being important enough to warrant whatever means to achieve it, does not lead to good things. That motivation completely disassembled the election campaign of the Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, in a year when electoral victory should have been a straightforward matter.
And all indications seem to be that those same polling headaches that derailed Romney's populist appeals, are in time going to become increasingly important factors in UK politics (Muir, 2014). With British cities following the trend of many others in Europe, and developing so-called 'super-diversity' - diverse and multi-cultural city populations - aiming at the lowest common denominator will ultimately be poisonous to your election chances.
If you play to the crowd in the crudest and most simplistic ways, you are going to alienate a diverse society. People who are marginalised or treated unequally, or have their lives rendered insecure by a country's establishment, need real solutions not empty platitudes. Worse still, by trying to just hint to each group that they will get what they want by voting for you, even when it runs contrary to other stances taken, people will notice. In the end all a party will achieve is to be mistrusted by the public.
Labour's best bet now is to break from this path, and to get out of the habit now. Diversity is the bane of this simplistic populist approach and if Labour don't start to get away from it, they'll find themselves dragged down with it's failure.
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References:
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+ Patrick Wintour's 'Miliband vows to end epidemic of insecurity sweeping through Britain'; in The Guardian; 12 June 2014.
+ The BBC's 'Ed Miliband Apologises for offence over Sun picture'; 13 June 2014.
+ Lisa O'Carroll's 'Hillsborough: MacKenzie offers 'profuse apologies' for Sun front page'; in The Guardian; 12 September 2012.
+ Hugh Muir's 'Labour and Tories face decline if they ignore minority vote, study finds'; in The Guardian; 20 June 2014.
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