Political Football



Jane Merrick writing in The Independent considers politics as football and makes a clever argument in which she suggests that with the World Cup in mind, the Labour Party should be regarded as Spain - not England.

Which makes sense to me because under Ed Miliband Labour does seem to have lost its mojo - the party's core message is confused and confusing, as it tries to be all things to all people, New Labour has become 'One Nation' Labour but in truth nobody has a clue as to  what that slogan means.
   
Political football: Why Labour is Spain, not England


By Jane Merrick - The Independent

If you are a football fan, or even if you are not a football fan, you probably can’t face reading about the World Cup after England’s humiliation. But let me try anyway. As England lost to Uruguay on Thursday, a few people on Twitter compared our hapless national team to Labour under Ed Miliband – poor on tactics, the wrong line-up, an uninspiring leader. Yet if the Opposition should be compared to a national football team, I think they are closer to Spain.

When the world and double European champions crashed out of the tournament last week, their veteran midfielder Xabi Alonso said his teammates had failed because they had lost their “hunger” to win. A team in red that won three stunning victories on the trot, now apparently hooked on defeat – that will sound familiar in Westminster. Alonso’s verdict was this: “The success, the happiness of before is gone, it’s run out and we haven’t been able to keep it going. We’ve made lots of mistakes, we’ve lost a bit of our know-how … We’ve not been able to keep the same levels of ambition and hunger, perhaps the real conviction to go for the championship.”

This analysis is very close to the one in the minds of senior figures in the Labour Party. Like Spain, they used to have a winning formula: for the world champions it was tiki-taka, the smooth passing and effortless style of play; for Labour it was a similarly effortless and smooth Tony Blair. Spain still has a number of supremely talented players, both veterans and youngsters. So does Labour – on the front and backbenches. But the Spanish tiki-taka has been stifled by aggressive counter-attack. They have tried to update the style, but in Brazil did not seem to know whether to go back to the winning formula, or be more radical and vigorous, like Holland. Vicente del Bosque’s team couldn’t decide, and lost in spectacular fashion. Miliband has the same problem.

One of the commonest criticisms of Miliband and his election team is of their failure to be radical. It is not surprising when the manifesto is being written by Douglas Alexander and Spencer Livermore, two safety-first strategists. So when presented with an à la carte menu of policies in the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)’s Condition of Britain report last week, Miliband chose as his headline dish something that seemed radical: cutting benefit for young jobless. The problem is that, after years of Miliband pitching from the left, it sounded out of key. Where is the over-arching message about what a Labour government would be like? Why did Miliband reject the equally radical yet more positive IPPR proposal to freeze child benefit and use the money on better childcare? It was like Spain trying to beat Holland by copying them. There was no coherence of strategy.

Since the leadership election, Labour MPs and activists have agonised about whether they have the wrong Miliband. But it seems there are not just two Milibands but three: David, and two Eds – one safety-first, one radical. Earlier this month, Marcus Roberts of the Fabian Society identified “Minority Miliband”, who aims for Labour’s core vote, and “Majority Miliband”, who tries to ignite public interest with bold, headline-grabbing policies. The squeeze on the jobless sounded like an attempt to be “Majority Miliband”, but it didn’t sound like a pitch for power. Radicalism can only win elections if it is authentic. To quote Alonso, it lacked conviction and hunger.

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