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An astonishing attack on Ed Miliband: “You are not articulating a vision or a destination”!

by Steve Beasant on 17 February, 2012

Tonight, there is an astonishing attack on the Leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband; in the form of an open letter from Alex Hilton on the Labourlist website.

Alex Hilton in his message to Ed Miliband, wrote:

Your election as Leader also upset me because the party was so desperate to elect someone who would recant the sins of New Labour that they refused to consider whether you actually meant it or whether you would be any good at the job of leading. It shocked me that anyone believed your proclaimed principles when at no time in your career had you espoused them before standing for the leadership. It shocked me that party members, unions and MPs would back you regardless of the fact that you were so clearly not up to the job, have no vision for Britain and can’t communicate very well. That said, I hoped I would be proved wrong once you had won.

Your leadership has shown me how lacking in vision you and Ed Balls are in particular but your team is in general. You talk nonsense about good companies and bad companies as though companies can have ethics. It’s not about companies, it’s the people who make decisions who are, or are not, ethically driven. And your confusing position on austerity is simply small minded.

Austerity may be a necessity but our party, with our values, ought to be standing up for people. And if that means “embracing” austerity, that should be conditional on an outright mission to attack the cost of living for the people who will have to pay for austerity. You know that the major cost of living is housing and that’s driven by a perverse, ever-inflating housing market. But you won’t push for real, meaningful policies that would reduce this overweight cost because any such policy would take the heat out of the housing market and lead to house price deflation. You won’t countenance policies to help the many if the few who will pay are Daily Mail reading swing voters in marginal seats.

This is the core of your problem. Because you believe in power over principle, you can’t tell the difference between vision and triangulation. You think you can keep the left just enough on side through pointless attacks on individual bankers’ bonuses or honours and that you can win the centre ground by attacking the unions and embracing austerity. This ridiculous lack of vision means that I have to wait to see what your latest quote is to know whether – this week – the party’s left wing or right.

While I don’t believe you are any more left wing than Blair or Brown, I don’t particularly care if you’re left or right wing. Leaders have to take a direction and it’s reasonable to ask party members to support the vision – the destination – even if the course isn’t the one those members would prefer.

My problem is that you are not a leader. You are not articulating a vision or a destination, you’re not clearly identifying a course and no-one’s following you. You’re simply coming out with unintelligible guff in response to the latest headlines and seemingly hoping that we’ll think its impenetrability is down to our lack of understanding rather than your lack of coherence. The nonsense you say isn’t even well crafted and your “something for something” speech at conference was simply embarrassing.

To read the full letter view, HERE.

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