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  1. Politics
18 November 2011

Miliband needs entrepreneur evangelists

The Labour leader's critique of "predatory" capitalism would be more effective delivered by experien

By Rafael Behr

In a speech yesterday Ed Miliband set out in more detail the economic thesis he first outlined in his speech to the Labour party conference. It is, in essence, that there are deep structural flaws in the way British capitalism works. There has, the Labour leader believes, been too much emphasis on short-term profit-seeking and not enough consideration for long-term investment. The UK economy has become host to too much “predatory” behaviour and should foster more sustainable, responsible, “productive” business practices.

When Miliband first set out this predator/producer distinction he was quickly ridiculed by commentators and savagely attacked by the Conservatives. His critics presented the Labour position as wanting to install some moral arbiter in the Treasury passing judgement on good and bad businesses – rewarding the former with tax breaks and punishing the latter with, well, who knows?

That, Labour insists, is a crude caricature of Miliband’s argument, but privately senior party figures accept that they left themselves open to such an attack by failing to flesh out the idea in more detail and, crucially, by failing to follow up the leader’s conference speech with more concrete examples of what he had in mind. Many in the shadow cabinet also feel that the speech itself suffered from being re-written too many times with input from too many people, so the core argument was buried in caveats and digressions.

Yesterday’s speech was certainly clearer and more focused – a virtue, perhaps, of being dedicated to one subject and so relieved of the pressures of a leader’s speech at a party conference, which, convention dictates, has to cover absolutely everything from foreign policy to lame jokes and semi-fictional anecdotes that “personalise” the policy along the lines “I met a brave woman in Dudley … her struggle demonstrates why …”

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Miliband is not a natural performer, so that idiom doesn’t suit him. He is more effective when simply making a straight argument, as he did yesterday, although of course far fewer people are listening when it is just another speech on a Thursday lunchtime. Miliband is also helped by having Chuka Umunna installed as his shadow Business Secretary, making very much the same argument, as he did in a speech on Monday. Umunna is young, unfamiliar to the voters – so can plausibly represent a new chapter in the Labour story – and a fluent television performer. When he was elevated to the shadow cabinet last month there was a fair amount of whispering about over-promotion (he was elected to parliament in 2010). It is fair to say that Umunna’s rapid rise and supreme confidence have ruffled a few feathers. Politics, like every other profession, is hardly free from envy. But many critics are already being swayed by what is generally felt to be an assured start by the shadow business secretary.

An essential part of Umunna’s brief is to go around persuading businesses small and large – and the City – that Labour has a credible position not just an elaborate whinge. In that respect, his youth is a handicap. Business audiences are always deeply suspicious of politicians who have no experience of enterprise themselves … which, these days, is most of them. George Osborne was routinely dismissed as a lightweight until the moment he became Chancellor.

For Labour this is a particular problem as the party is dominated by career politicians and people who have risen up through the trade union movement. It was a noticeable feature of the party’s conference this year that hardly anyone spoke from the platform with long experience of the private sector. It is a gap that Ed Miliband urgently needs to fill, both in the way the party presents itself to the public and on his own staff. He is getting better at explaining his “predatory v productive capitalism” idea, but that will have limited effect unless it is bolstered by actual business people saying the same thing. Speeches will never be enough. He needs some heavyweight capitalists joining in to say, in effect, “yes, we are with Ed on this.” And he needs someone in his immediate entourage, currently full of academics, think tankers and ex-journalists, who can bring the experience of running a business to the heart of the leader’s operation. There are ethical, conscientious, socially responsible entrepreneurs out there. Ed Miliband needs to be recruiting them as evangelists for Labour’s vision of a better capitalism. Otherwise his position on the economy will struggle to graduate from being an abstract critique to being a serious political proposition.

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