Dear Mr Miliband,
Like, I’m pretty sure, thousands of other members and supporters of the Labour party, I was immensely heartened and impressed by your conference speech on Tuesday. It was a real tour de force; your commitment and radicalism shone through it. Many of us have been waiting far too long to hear some of the things you said. Bravo!
You mentioned that you had been receiving a good deal of largely unsolicited advice. Well, here’s one more unsolicited but modest suggestion. There are lots of policy issues which we could all press on you (and I almost certainly shall in due course), but there’s one particular thing that deserves urgent attention, before parliament meets again. It’s about your pledge to change politics — and specifically about Prime Minister’s Questions.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of PMQs as the forum in which the people of Britain will get to know you, and to judge you. It’s also impossible to overstate the disgust that thousands of us have been experiencing, week by ghastly week, at the puerile punch-and-judy punch-up that PMQs have sunk to in recent years — not only at the childish exchanges of insults between the two principals but also at the meaningless baying from the back benches. Not many people are such political nerds, or have so much spare time on a weekday, that they can watch each week’s PMQ’s from start to finish (as I generally do), but tens of thousands see the clips on their television news and current affairs programmes, and the clips, seen and heard in isolation from their context, are often even more dreadful than the ritual corrida as a whole.
You appealed for a grown-up debate on the real issues facing us. There can be no better place to start it than PMQs. Cameron will of course try to patronise, provoke and rile you, egged on by the coalition pack. What a brilliant impression you will make if your questions are courteous requests for information that you genuinely want to have, and if your reactions to petty point-scoring are calm and polite! You might make it a rule never to ask a question to which you already know the answer: it’s an opportunity to seek information about government policy and practice, not for laying traps. By all means express withering scorn for Cameron’s taunts and condescension, remind him that he’s there to provide information and not to score points, but then repeat your courteous request for the information you perfectly reasonably seek. You might tell him that if you can treat him with the respect due to the prime minister of our country, the least he can do is treat you with the respect due to the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Shame him, don’t score off him.
Before your first PMQs, you will need to tell the parliamentary Labour party in a private session that you are determined to change PMQs into an occasion that will win public respect instead of scorn, and that to achieve this you will need the cooperation of your back-benchers: no more baying and howling, no more loud false laughter, no more jeering. A few quiet ‘Hear, Hears’ to salute your best points should be quite enough. A few louder ‘Hear, Hears’ to greet those of your questions in which you actually welcome aspects of government policy, and pay suitable compliments to those ministers doing the right things, will be even better. How civilised it will be if you can refrain from making lengthy speeches to introduce each question — and, if I might discreetly say so, we have by now firmly grasped the point about how much you love your brother. Enough said.
The impression you’ll be able to make by this dramatic change of style should be immediate and hugely favourable. Of course your speeches and the way you handle radio and television interviews will be important too — and you have shown in your interview on the Andrew Marr Show last Sunday that you have real flair in that tricky department. But PMQs may prove to be the most important litmus test of all. It will require almost superhuman self-control not to bite back in response to intolerable provocation, not only from the prime minister but also from the supporting primates beside and behind him. If you can bring yourself to treat them as humans, and grown-up humans too, perhaps they will start to behave like grown-up humans. Even if they don’t, the effort will add hugely to your stature. I’m sure you will bring it off superbly.
Best wishes: you’ve made a cracking start, if I might respectfully says so — all you have to do now is keep it up.
PS: Yes, I cast both my first preferences for you — and your conference speech vindicated my judgement in spades.
Brian
The long leadership campaign is over and the most promising candidate from Labour’s point of view has won. The next significant events are next week’s elections by Labour MPs to the shadow cabinet and Ed Miliband’s allocation of shadow portfolios to those elected. The biggest problems here will be Ed Balls and David Miliband, both certain to win shadow cabinet places (assuming that David decides to stand).
Ed Balls ran a splendid, pugnacious leadership campaign and was easily the most effective of the potentially electable candidates in exposing the coalition’s kamikaze economic policies, to the point where he seemed at times to have taken on the role of leader of the opposition. He will desperately want to be shadow Chancellor and, if denied that key post, could be a smouldering threat in any other capacity to the new leader. The problem is that he was the keenest and most aggressive Brownite, probably more so than Gordon, and his performance as Chancellor of the Exchequer if Labour wins the next election would risk replicating the worst features of Gordon Brown’s Chancellorship — the secretiveness, constant disloyal challenges to the prime minister’s authority, the apparent willingness to let his team brief against colleagues, the failure to work in a collegiate spirit with ministerial colleagues, the by-passing of officials whose advice might prove unwelcome: administration by exclusive coterie. No doubt Balls is aware of these fears about the way he would behave as Chancellor in a Labour government and will try to avoid confirming such suspicions, if given the job. But can this oldish dog really learn new tricks now?
Another dimension of the potential problem is that if David does decide to stand for the shadow cabinet, the only position Ed can offer without humiliating him will be shadow Chancellor, and that further aggravates the Balls dilemma. In the somewhat unlikely event of my being in Ed Miliband’s shoes, I would either appoint Ed Balls as shadow Chancellor (but secretly resolve not to appoint him as substantive Chancellor in a Labour government), or appoint brother David as shadow Chancellor on the understanding that after, say, two years he would move on to another shadow post (home secretary? Minister of Justice? even back to Foreign Secretary?) whereupon Balls would become shadow Chancellor. In other words, Balls might well excel as shadow Chancellor in opposition, but to have him as the actual Chancellor of the Exchequer in a Labour government would be unacceptably risky, given the way he seems to have acted with Gordon Brown at the Treasury not very long ago.
The reaction of the Tory press, Tory loud-mouth MPs and Tory bloggers has been utterly predictable. Because in the final round, after redistribution of preferences, David had a slim majority over Ed in the constituency and MPs sections, with Ed depending on an almost equally slim majority in the trade union section for his overall majority, the Tories are already baying about ‘Red Ed’ being a hostage of the unions and questioning his legitimacy as an elected leader. This is juvenile rubbish. The trade union movement created the Labour Party and has always been as much a part of it as the individual members: the union element keeps the party’s feet on the ground. Ed M will no more be a prisoner of the unions than any other Labour leader has been: the unions are unlikely to withhold funding from Labour under Ed if his policies are not 100% to their liking, not least because they have nowhere else to go — just as big business and the City are unlikely to stop financing the Conservative party, whatever its policies, since they have nowhere else to go either.
As for the legitimacy of the election, Ed won more first preference votes overall than his brother, including solid backing in all three sections. There are paradoxes and even perversities in the results, but so there are under all electoral systems. As for the dire predictions in the media (and not just the Tory media) of the result sowing the seeds of renewed civil war in the party between Old Blairites (i.e. the Davidistas) and Old Brownites (i.e. the EdMilistas), there’s a good chance that all that’s in the past and that we shall now see a Labour party united behind its leader as rarely before — provided only that Ed has the good sense to tell the Blunketts, Mandelsons, Alan Johnsons, Blairs and Straws to shut up and concentrate on rewriting their memoirs for their paperback editions.
Finally, the Red Ed issue. The Tory press and their feral bloggers have evidently noticed Ed Miliband’s campaign promises to scrap Britain’s nuclear deterrent, cancel the orders for aircraft carriers and fighter aircraft, bring our troops home from Afghanistan as soon as transport for them can be arranged, place a copy of the United Nations Charter in every office of the MoD and the FCO, re-nationalise the railways and the utilities, split up the banks and start regulating them decisively, raise the top rate of income tax to 60% and promise a referendum on the future of the monarchy[1]. To that limited extent, Ed’s position might fairly be described as somewhat to the left of centre. A candidate who promised not a single one of those things — for each of which a perfectly solid and sensible case can be made, and indeed Diane Abbott made a strong case for most of them — would be difficult to categorise as a dangerous lefty, even if he is brave enough to give up the hallowed practice of authorising the Daily Mail to determine his policies. Red Ed! Such is the fantasy world inhabited by our right-wing leaders and commentators that they are happy to use this absurd tag in the hope of discrediting Milibrother Jnr. For some of us, the major worry about him is that he isn’t nearly red enough.
I think time will show that the party made the right choice. Both brothers are exceptionally able: either would have made a very good party leader and ultimately prime minister. There is more evidence of David’s strengths and weaknesses from his longer time in high ministerial office than there is of Ed’s: David carries more baggage. But on such evidence as there is, Ed seems to me to be the stronger and more innovative character, probably more decisive, more prepared to think outside the box and less inhibited by conventional orthodoxies, braver and less risk-averse. (Almost as importantly, he seems to have a sense of humour; as far as anyone knows, David doesn’t do funny.) With luck that judgement will turn out to have been a good guess.
Meanwhile we must hope that next week Labour MPs will elect a shadow cabinet full of daisy-fresh faces in Ed Miliband’s mould, not a gaggle of clapped-out members of the old guard, chanting their tedious mantras on automatic pilot. They served us well in their time — some of them, anyway. Ed’s and the party’s message to them now must be to ‘kindly leave the stage’.
PS: When Ed Miliband receives his invitation to fly out for a chat with Rupert Murdoch on some Australian Barrier Reef island or Californian sea-side retreat, with a private plane at his disposal for the trip, please, please, Ed, tell him, in the blunt terms that a one-time Australian can understand, where he can put it.
[1] No, he didn’t promise any of those things. I’m being ironical — geddit?
Brian
I shan’t buy Tony Blair’s book: judging by the extracts I have read, it would do bad things to my blood pressure. But I have read the Kosovo chapter, which is about as mendacious and misleading an account of a major international event as it’s possible to imagine. Don’t groan that it’s all ancient history now, no longer worth our attention. It led on directly to Iraq, and if we’re not going to allow that blunder to happen again, it’s important to learn the real lessons from Kosovo, and not to allow the perversely distorted and self-serving account offered by Mr Blair to become the accepted wisdom.
In A Journey Tony Blair, who boasts openly of having been the principal cheerleader for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, skates smoothly over the preceding conference at Rambouillet, at which a pretext for military action against the Serbs in revenge for Bosnia was shamelessly manufactured; claims falsely that when the bombing was getting nowhere he persuaded his friend Clinton to agree to an invasion by land forces (Clinton in fact never agreed to any such thing: the Congress would never have agreed to it: and there was never the smallest possibility of getting NATO agreement to it); and then asserts that it was because of the “prospect of ground troops” that Milosevic “retreated in disarray”, whereas Milosevic knew there was no such prospect; and ascribes Milosevic’s “capitulation” to a visit to Belgrade by “the UN negotiators led by President Ahtisaari of Finland”. Actually the UN never authorised the NATO attack (which was therefore illegal under international law) and never sent negotiators under Ahtisaari or anyone else to negotiate with Milosevic. When three months of NATO bombing all across Yugoslavia was clearly no nearer to securing Milosevic’s acceptance of the ludicrous ultimatum issued at Rambouillet, and with Blair clamouring for an utterly unreal escalation of the air attack to a full-scale ground invasion, Clinton quietly secured Yeltsin’s agreement to send the former Russian prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, to join the American diplomat Strobe Talbott, US Deputy Secretary of State, and Martti Ahtisaari, the Finnish President and experienced UN negotiator, to go to Belgrade with a radical revision of the Rambouillet demands, to which Milosevic, knowing that with the Russian now involved the game was up, soon acceded. If Clinton and Blair had been prepared from the start to accept Russian participation in the search for an end to the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the eventual Talbott-Chernomyrdin-Ahtisaari settlement could have been achieved three months earlier without a bomb being dropped, a rocket fired or a drop of blood spilled.
Blair’s book’s account also implies, again falsely, that the Serbs were driving Kosovo Albanians out of Kosovo as refugees into neighbouring countries before the NATO attack began (in fact the NATO attack precipitated it, so the exodus can’t be cited as an excuse for the NATO attack). And, finally, he claims that the eventual fall of Milosevic from power was a result of the NATO action, whereas there’s good evidence that NATO’s attack actually strengthened Milosevic’s position with his fellow-Serbs, and his later electoral defeat occurred well after the dust had settled on Kosovo. The passages on pages 227 and 242 of the Blair book encapsulate the principal misrepresentations and distortions of the whole account of the Kosovo disaster.
Blair’s potted history of the Kosovo affair unaccountably omits to mention that the British government’s legal advisers were warning that the proposed NATO attack on Yugoslavia for the proclaimed purpose of forcing Milosevic to obey the demands of the Rambouillet ultimatum would be unlawful under the Charter, the supreme instrument of international law — until the Americans, and Tony Blair himself, persuaded them to change their advice (as one of the Americans involved incautiously revealed in a newspaper article later [James Rubin, press spokesman for US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the time of Rambouillet and the NATO attack on Serbia, Financial Times, 29 Sep 2000: quoted here]) Does that ring some kind of bell?
If some of this sounds strangely familiar, that could be because the Kosovo war was a curtain-raiser for Iraq. Blair — as his book makes unashamedly clear — contrived to convince himself, and an improbably large number of others, that the ending of Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo had been achieved by the use of force (and the threat of even greater force): and that he, Blair, had been the principal author and protagonist — as indeed he was — of the whole triumphantly successful operation — as in plain fact it was not. The lesson he managed to learn from Kosovo was that you could use force against another country without UN authority and without the excuse of acting in self-defence, and get away with it. To exalt and justify the NATO attack with the trappings of a Doctrine, he invented a prototype of the purely illusory “right of humanitarian intervention”, launched in a notorious speech in Chicago in April 1999, shortly after the start of the NATO assault. Hailed as their heroic saviour by the Kosovo Albanians, Blair became a fervent apostle of the use of force in international affairs, where necessary without regard to international law. His book vividly illustrates how a comprehensive misreading of Kosovo encouraged his tendency to self-deception, solipsistic moralising and a messianic belief in his personal destiny, culminating inexorably in his decision to join the most unprincipled American president in living memory in the tragic aggression against Iraq.
The NATO attack on Yugoslavia over Kosovo was: unnecessary; illegal and in plain breach of the UN Charter; publicly justified by fraud and deception (namely, the deliberate misrepresentation of what really happened at Rambouillet); responsible for well over 12,000 deaths, the great majority of these being of innocent civilians; the cause of enormous damage to the economic infrastructure of all the countries of the region; and, in the end, wholly unsuccessful, since it was not the NATO military action but quiet US-Russian-Finnish diplomacy — in which Blair and the UK played no part whatever — that finally forced Milosevic to end the ethnic cleansing and to withdraw his forces from Kosovo.
All this, you might say, is now water under the bridge, and (to mix the liquid clichés) relatively small beer compared with Iraq. But we still need to understand what really happened to make Iraq possible, and to identify the factors in that criminal blunder which contributed to it, so that we can try to minimise the risk of such a thing ever happening again. Kosovo was one such factor, with its numerous Iraqi echoes. The single word “therefore” makes a lethal and incontrovertible point in a question posed by the writer Thomas Powers in the August 19 issue of the New York Review of Books, referring to Iraq, but equally applicable to Kosovo, and referring to a president, but equally applicable to a prime minister [emphasis added]:
What is the proper response to a president who has conspired to launch an unjustified and therefore illegal war against another country? The more clearly the matter is stated, the more troubling are its implications.
It’s tempting to say that 11 years later it’s time to ‘move on’. But we still haven’t even begun to consider seriously those “troubling implications”, and before we can possibly do so, the untruths and evasions in Tony Blair’s book need to be exposed, so that we may at long last face the reality of what went so badly wrong.
Brian
Congratulations to Alex Smith and Mark Ferguson of the Labour List blog on coming first in the list of 100 best Labour blogs — the latest results of a poll conducted by the (right-of-centre) Total Politics website of the well-known Conservative blogger and television commentator, Iain Dale. The full list is here: those with sufficient stamina and spare time may even spot the present Ephems blog blinking shyly at No. 77. In the words of Total Politics,
This list is the result of more than 2,200 people who voted in the Total Politics Annual Blog Poll during the second half of July. Click on [any blog in the list] to visit it.
At the rate of one blog a day, starting at No. 1, you’d get to Ephems in 11 weeks’ time, and by then we’ll all know who has won the election for the new leader of the Labour Party.
As a fairly frequent contributor to Labour List, I’m delighted to see it promoted from No. 3 last year to the top slot in 2010. There’s only one problem with Labour List: there’s so much first-rate material on it that it’s impossible to read it all, and if you’re not careful you end up not reading any of it, like the donkey which, being equidistant from two identical bales of straw, starved to death. Not yet a problem with Ephems!
Brian
If April is the cruellest month (and I could never see why it should be), September, signalling the decline of summer and the approach of autumn, is surely the saddest. So Strauss’s Four Last Songs at the BBC Prom on 4 September, almost always moving, were intensely so on this occasion, not just because of the deeply emotional 
singing of the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila but especially because of the glorious, deeply-felt playing of the Berlin Philharmonic under their principal conductor, Liverpudlian Simon Rattle. I listened to it first live on BBC Radio 3 and was initially uncertain about what seemed perhaps an excessive theatricality in Mattila’s singing. I had taped it, and played it over a couple of times immediately afterwards. Each time it seemed more genuine and more intense.
A couple of hours later, the whole Prom was broadcast on BBC television, and now the experience of the Strauss songs was transformed by the sight as well as the sound of Mattila, Rattle and the marvellous orchestra. What on radio had at first sounded suspiciously theatrical could now be heard as something deeply spiritual. As the last glorious notes of the last of the four songs, “Im Abendrot” (At Sunset), almost literally died away, the intense hush before the start of the applause seemed to go on for ever, as if to break the spell by the slightest sound would have been unthinkable. The applause, when it came, was rapturous – almost as emotional as at the end of the Mahler First Symphony the previous evening, also performed by Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker. Karita Mattila, almost overcome by her thunderous reception as well, I suspect, as by spiritual exhaustion from singing this extraordinary music, hugged Simon Rattle and the leader of the orchestra again and again, half laughing and half crying, repeatedly miming her homage to the orchestra and her acknowledgement of the packed audience, as the applause rolled on and on.
I don’t think this was necessarily one of the great performances of Strauss’s valedictory. The great sopranos of the age have almost all recorded it and many of the resulting disks are sublime. But last night’s occasion at the Albert Hall, the work of a great German composer performed by a German orchestra, perhaps the greatest on the planet, under an outstanding British conductor and with a fine Finnish soprano, one day after the anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war on Hitler’s Germany, had a special resonance which seemed to be echoed in the emotional response of the enormous audience and the equally emotional reaction of the performers to it. And it was September, title and theme of the second of the four songs.
The Vier letzte Lieder, Strauss’s last finished work, were composed in 1948 when the composer was 84, only three years after the end of the war which had imposed such a tempestuous and tragic experience on the whole German people[1], including not least on Richard Strauss himself. Strauss did not live to hear the world premiere, performed in London at this very same Royal Albert Hall, home of the Proms, on 22 May 1950 by the great Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra and conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler, the celebrated and to some people infamous German conductor. Furtwängler’s tortured relations with Hitler and the Nazis had forced him to take refuge in Switzerland almost at the end of the war, only five years before the London premiere of the Four Last Songs. There is a moving account of the controversy surrounding Furtwängler’s attitude to the Nazis here. History has, I think, fully acquitted him.
The BBC Proms website describes the Four Last Songs as “Strauss’s opulently nostalgic reflections on life’s last days”, but I don’t think that quite gets it. The music is deeply sad, but also philosophical about the inevitable approach of death, and the last bars of the orchestral ending of the last song seem to signal, as clearly as only music can, peaceful acceptance, not nostalgia, not regret, no hint of any rage against the dying of the light. In 1948, moreover, ‘peace’ could not have referred only to the peace of death. Rattle and this sensational band caught this perfectly. I used to suspect that you needed to be over 65 truly to appreciate the Four Last Songs: better still, over 75. But Rattle is a mere youthful 55, so I must be wrong. His eight years (so far) conducting the Berliners have evidently welded them all together into a single organism and that must make up for his extreme youth. All Brits should be proud that the members of this iconic orchestra chose one of our own fellow-countrymen to lead them through good days and occasionally bad for the better part of a decade. To hear a great British maestro conduct a great German orchestra with a splendid Finnish soprano in a German composer’s final masterpiece with so many tragic historical undertones was indeed a memorable experience.
[1] As well as on a few million others, of course.
Brian
