Ed Miliband spoke in Norwich last night. Local Green party councillor Rupert Read attended and was impressed by the performance.
Regular Left Foot Forward contributor, and Green party councillor, Rupert Read writes from the Ed Miliband roadshow:
On hearing that Ed Miliband would be speaking at an ‘Ed Miliband for Labour Leader’ event yesterday, on the edge of my ward and less than a mile from where I live, I asked his office if I could come along and write something about it for Left Foot Forward. To their credit, they agreed.
When I arrived, my right to come in was queried by a local Labour candidate who presumed that Ed Miliband’s team were unaware that I was a local Green Party politician. A phonecall went through to his campaign HQ; they confirmed that they were happy for me to be able to attend. A little bit of pluralism in action, which impressed me; I wonder if Balls’ or Burnham’s teams would have been so willing.
When Ed Miliband arrived, he spoke for a good while fluently without notes, and then took swathes of questions from the crowd (mostly Labour activists, members and Councillors).
He was plainly making a play to be recognised as ‘the change candidate’, by implicit contrast with his brother. (One audience-member asked him pointedly if his sole case for being picked by the membership was that he wasn’t a Blairite). He said that “The question at this [Labour leadership] election is who is willing to confront what went wrong under the last government”, and then listed various such items, including:
• the 10p tax rate abolition;
• the failure until near the end of the Labour government’s tenure to support council house building and stock-retention in any way (One of the biggest supportive noises of the evening from the audience was when he said that things would have been much better if John Healey had been made Housing Minister in 1997);
• the lack of any serious industrial policy until late on in the government; and
• a poor record on civil liberties.
He expressed support for Ken Clarke against Michael Howard on the question of whether ‘prison works’ or not, and demurred from the view of some in Labour that it was possible or wise to out-Right the Right on issues such as crime and terrorism. He didn’t want Labour to attack Clarke or Theresa May as ‘soft on crime’.
On immigration, he said that “It’s a class issue”. In other words that in most cases it isn’t racism but worries about the driving down of wages etc., that motivates working-class concern about immigration. He backed a Living Wage though, disappointingly, he seemed unprepared to legislate for it, preferring to leave it to local initiatives and to ‘demonstration effects’ and ‘leadership effects’ from bringing it in in public services. It’s true that since Greens introduced the idea of a Living Wage, most progress on it has been made by local Councils – but if government were to underwrite it, it would of course be far more effective.
As a philosopher, I appreciated his quip that “You don’t have to make your economy nasty, brutish, and short”; and as a Green, I appreciated his remark that “Anthropogenic climate change is the biggest issue that we face.”
Since I was attending as a citizen-journalist, and a member of another political Party to boot, I didn’t want to try to take up any of Ed Miliband’s time, as the meeting ended and local Labour members got their photos taken with him. But then I heard him saying to his aide, “Where’s the Green guy; I must touch base with him before we move on”. So I went up and introduced myself, and was able to ask him the question that I have been trying to get an answer to from him (or from his brother) for the last few years:
“You are widely thought to be the ‘greenest’ of the Labour leadership candidates. In government, you often spoke proudly of Labour’s record on the issue of manmade climate change. But isn’t it a fact, once one counts carbon emissions in a scientifically-respectable way (incorporating embodied energy/emissions, and sea and air travel), that Britain’s emissions rose significantly from 1997 to 2010? Shouldn’t that – the failure of the Labour government to rein in Britain’s carbon emissions – be your starting point, in debating CO2 emissions, climate change, and the green agenda?”
His answer on the point about the non-inclusion of air and sea transport in the government’s figures disappointed me. He didn’t accept my point on the statistics, which are detailed in the sources that I gave in my recent piece over on Liberal Conspiracy about this.
His answer on embodied emissions was more interesting, and not unconvincing. He argued that it doesn’t make sense to count responsibility for emissions where power over them doesn’t lie. In other words, he held that emissions need to be counted where they originate, in the countries that can potentially control them. (Of course, one could counter that it would still be perfectly possible to exercise significant control over them, if our country were willing, as I believe it should be, to control products’ entry into our borders partly on the basis of their emissions footprint.)
As I left the event, I was left with the impression that Ed Miliband, for all that I am not particularly impressed with his actual record in government (as opposed to some of his ideas for the future), and for all that I still disagree with him about numerous important things (for example, Carbon Capture and Storage), is the Labour leadership candidate most likely (with the possible exception of Diane Abbott) to help take the political agenda in this country in the direction in which it most needs to go.
38 Responses to “A green perspective on Ed Miliband”
Andrew Collingwood
RT @mikeblakeney: RT @leftfootfwd: A green perspective on Ed Miliband http://bit.ly/bfeOtY
Rachel Hardy
RT @leftfootfwd: A green perspective on Ed Miliband http://bit.ly/bfeOtY
Liz McShane
Anon – is the basis of you favouring Diane Abbott that you hope Labour will never get back in to Government in 2015?
Green shoots of a different kind | Bright Green
[…] Labour Leadership campaign is of course a matter of general national interest – well, so, increasingly, should be the positive changes occurring to the Green Party, for we, […]
Anon E Mouse
Liz – I want to see a root and branch clean out of the party and to see it go back to where it should be.
In this country there needs to be a philosophical difference between the parties – love or loath Thatcher at least people knew where they stood with her. What I don’t like is when people make statements about her that aren’t true such as there were cut’s under her leadership which is completely untrue – there were real term rises in spending on public services of 1.1%.
So people need to be truthful about things. As soon as you have a basis of truth established, whether one agrees with it or not is irrelevant because it’s truthful.
That’s why I was annoyed Shalik Malik on Question Time kept trying to portray Nigel Farage as borderline racist because he disagrees, like me, with the wearing of face veils in public buildings. Malik was being deceitful and that’s not on from a public servant.
Now truth is established across the political divide at lease you know what people stand for because you trust them.
Then you can gauge what the policies are and the ones you agree or disagree with – there can now be a divide, a different approach to the politics of governing this country but one that is based on old fashioned honesty.
I despair when I read some of the articles on this fine blog by contributors such as David Taylor or Ben Fox that are purely their own speculative opinion and quite simply ridiculous and not credible in the real world. Not only that they won’t even produce any “evidence” for their silly opinions – I put it down to their feather bedded privileged backgrounds and youth. They’ll grow out of it.
It is because of the likes of these sycophantic people (“useful idiots”)that Labour didn’t take decisive action and ditch the totally useless Gordon Brown that we are now where we are.
The coalition government, that I now support because of Nick Clegg, have NOTHING to fear as long as the left keep printing articles by either of the aforementioned individuals or others like them on this blog. They are a link to the past and not a past the public supports. Clearly.
So the leadership election – I support Abbott because she would bring some colour (no pun intended) to the otherwise grey candidates.
David Miliband will win – Balls is hopeless and too close to Brown, Burnham too working class ironically and Ed Miliband too weird for the public to warm to.
As for the chances of Labour winning in 2015.. yeah and pigs will fly. They have no hope.