So tomorrow, Ed Miliband will say something significant about welfare. Some of the outline has been briefed in advance and some has leaked out perhaps not so strategically. Either way, we know that the Labour leader is going to say something that he hopes will make it harder for his enemies to claim, as they often do, that he doesn’t want to talk about benefits.
In fact, his friends have privately said much the same too. More than once in recent months I’ve been told by Labour MPs, including shadow cabinet ministers, that the reason the party’s line on welfare is a bit foggy is that Ed himself “hasn’t properly made up his mind what he thinks.” Well, it seems that now he has. And tomorrow, we’re going to find out the result of his meditations.
There isn’t much point in me going on at length about it here, not least because, judging by standard media-management practice, there will be some little surprise that Team Ed has held back and that everyone will be talking about tomorrow afternoon. The Labour leader likes to disappear into his cave to think very hard for weeks at a time and then emerge with something shiny so that his anxious tribe that was on the verge of panicking and the media are briefly dazzled and cry, “Oooh! We underestimated him. Again.” (We’ll pass quickly over the fact that this technique – the meticulously planned set-piece intervention – may owe something to Miliband’s apprenticeship at the feet of one G Brown in the Treasury.)
A final observation: by the sounds of things, the welfare line that Miliband is going to take owes a lot to the work that Liam Byrne has been doing. That shouldn’t be a surprise, given that Byrne is shadow work and pensions secretary. Yet a feature of Labour’s welfare debate in recent years as been the shadow secretary of state coming out with speeches, statements and interviews on the need to restore the contributory principle; on “switch-spending”; on returning to Bevan’s original vision that coupled an individual’s responsibility to work with the state’s duty to guarantee full employment – and the leader’s office going eerily quiet. Meanwhile, the left piles into Byrne as a Blairite stooge.
So isolated has Byrne looked at times that I recently asked a senior Labour source in the leader’s office to confirm that what the Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions said about benefits could actually be taken as a statement of current Labour party policy. “Absolutely,” came the answer. “Ed thinks the same as Liam.” When I then pointed out that it didn’t always come across that way, I got the answer: “Well we do have to work on getting our message across more clearly.”
I put the same question to another senior shadow cabinet figure a week or so ago and was told: “Ed gets it now. He will deliver the message himself and it will be in neon and lit up like a firework.” So tomorrow, it seems, is the day doubts about Miliband’s commitment to welfare reform go up in flames. In a good way, they hope.
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