Why I’m supporting Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband has often called himself the ‘modernising candidate’, and recently he provided evidence to show that most of the voters that abandoned Labour were not middle-class professionals, but skilled and unskilled manual workers. They felt as if Labour no longer had their interests at heart. Ed Miliband has adopted the slogan ‘No victory without values’ for his campaign, because he recognises that sticking with the baggage of New Labour will not win those disaffected voters back. If Labour is to return to power, it has to change to win. Ed is standing to address the issue of low wages, working time and inequality. Ed wants to support the trade union link; the unions themselves believe Ed is the best candidate to defend this, and have put their support behind Ed.

The minimum wage is often held up as one of New Labour’s most successful policies, and rightly so. But the lowest paid don’t receive enough even to live on. This is wrong, and Ed has put the campaign for a living wage at the centre of his campaign. He and his team have been lobbying the heads of Britain’s largest companies to persuade them to adopt a living wage, outlining the enormous benefits this would have. He would continue this in opposition. Ed is also for greater protection for time outside work so people don’t feel compelled to work harder for longer for less.

I have been involved in climate change activism and I first met Ed through this. Ed is very highly regarded in the climate change activist community for his tireless hard work in putting the green agenda at the forefront of Labour policy-making. He has said, for example, that “anthropogenic climate change is the biggest issue that we face”. He led the British negotiating team at Copenhagen with this in mind. Were he to win, Ed would be the greenest of the three main party leaders.

Finally, Ed is a brilliant communicator. He listens to all arguments and vociferously defends his own views. He is an excellent public speaker. Neil Kinnock said that Ed has ‘the capacity to inspire’, a rare quality that the great Labour communicators of history have had. If we are to win back power, we have to have clearly defined positions on the important issues of our time. Ed is best placed to argue the case of the centre-left against an onslaught of Tory/Lib Dem cuts, putting into practice their own brand of Thatcherism. That sort of figurehead is just what we need right now. That is why I am supporting Ed Miliband for Labour leader.

Reproduced from a blog post I wrote for Tizzy Thinks

Ed Miliband twitter background

I’ve made an Ed Miliband twitter background to help build his online presence.

Please download it and set it as your background in ‘Settings’, ‘Design’, ‘Change Background Image’, and upload it from your computer.

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Learning from 1994: Union nominations

I’ve decided to write a few blogposts about what we can learn from the 1994 leadership election. I will kick-off with union nominations, as news has come today of Unite’s almost unanimous nomination of Ed Miliband, completing his collection of the ‘big three’ unions: Unite, GMB, and Unison. These three unions make up almost five million of the electoral college electorate of eight million.

The union nominations in 1994 were as follows:

Margaret Beckett:

• Transport and General Workers Union

Tony Blair:

• Iron and Steel Trades Confederation
• Labour Students
• The Christian Socialist Movement
• Society of Labour Lawyers

John Prescott:

• Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers & Firemen
• Graphical, Paper & Media Union
• National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies & Shotfirers
• National Union of Mineworkers
• National Union of Rail, Maritime & Transport Workers

Source

Beckett’s nomination by the T&GWU is perhaps equivalent to Ed Miliband’s Unite nomination. David’s brother has collected a number of the unions which nominated across the broad range of the trio in 1994. Of course, the differences between the candidates today are more nuanced than they were in 1994, but it is still significant that Ed Miliband can have such a broad coalition of support from across the trade union movement leadership, something that was partly achieved by Prescott in 1994, apart from the T&GWU.

In the final ballot, Tony Blair won 52.3% of the affiliated section, against 28.4% for John Prescott and 19.3% for Margaret Beckett. Blair’s union and Socialist Society nominations significantly understated his support amongst ordinary union members. Perhaps this will transpire in September; in the nomination meeting of the Unite National Political Committee, David Miliband received no supporting votes, despite the CLP nominations showing a significant level of support for him. Furthermore, the only union which nominated Tony Blair in 1994 was the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, which in 2004 became Community, one of two unions to nominate David Miliband thus far. In 1994, the affiliated section votes were almost identical to the party members, amongst whom Blair won 58.2% with Prescott on 24.4% and Margaret Beckett on 17.4%. This perhaps indicates that the level of CLP nominations will be broadly extrapolated across the fold to the unions, although I strongly doubt this.

John Smith, of course, abolished the union block vote during his membership, establishing the electoral college. The affiliated society section made up one third of that in 1994, and still does. With a declining union membership nationwide, and a number of unions disaffiliating, such as the RMT, who nominated Prescott in 1994, individual union nominations are perhaps more important than they were in 1994. Unions make up a smaller section of that one third, however, than they did in 1994. Each vote in the Socialist Societies is slightly more influential than it was in 1994. This will not significantly affect the level of influence amongst the union vote, nor will it significantly affect the level of influence of the leaderships of the unions, as the number of members of the Socialist Societies pales into insignificance when looking at the total electorate of the affiliated societies section today.

Perhaps the most important difference between 1994 and 2010 is that Blair was always destined to win three ways in the first round. With the final victor of the 2010 contest completely unknown, second preferences will have a lot more influence now than they did in 1994. Ed Miliband has been called the ‘second preference candidate’ by the likes of Andrew Neill, and I suspect that even if union members vote for Abbott, Balls and Burnham in larger numbers than their leaderships, I predict the nominations will strongly influence second preferences, probably handing victory in the affiliated society section to Ed Miliband, as a first round victory in the affiliated societies section is highly unlikely in this five-way leadership election.