David Miliband speaks....

I've read David Miliband's article in the New Statesman, which seems to have got annoyed a few people and I can't quite work out why.

There's not much in there that you would not expect David Miliband to say. He's always been seen as the keeper of the Blairite flame by the Blair fanboys so I would only have been surprised if the article had started: "I've been thinking this through and decided that my Dad was right."

It isn't particularly poetic and it isn't a passionate vision. In fact most of it is pretty bog standard politicalese. Phrases full of sound & fury signifying...nothing: "decentralisation...active government...choices....decisions...champion...reform...modernise...blah-di-blah-blah".

What I don't see is an attack on Ed particularly. There's an attack on the 'Reassurance Tendency' - which implies that the Labour Party has moved so far now even its radical wing doesn't have the energy to get 'Militant'. It's the classic position of a Blairite. Nothing more, nothing less. A lot of what he says is an echo of Ed's comments about 'responsible capitalism'. 

Quite why everyone's got their bees a-buzzin' is beyond me but it does prove that David seems to have lost his right to have an opinion on Labour issues because his brother is in charge. Why we can't agree that disagreement - even public disagreement - is the sign of maturity is beyond me. We should be able to have public discussions about policies and politics without it being seen as 'treachery'.

Yes, I'm sure David Miliband is still smarting over losing to Ed. He's worked his way quite high up the greasy pole so he's not going to be without an ego. I know from my own personal experience that you can love your brother but still get a bit uncomfortable when he starts treading on what you stupidly consider your own territory. Certain things define you as a person, however much you wish they didn't and I suspect losing to Ed shook David up a bit. However none of that means he should be silenced. In fact I'd like to see him on the front bench again. He might be a Blairite but he's an effective Blairite.

So I don't agree with David Milliband when he thinks that "...not a single major business endorsed Labour, and we cannot afford that again." I think being too close to business and too far from the people the Labour Party is supposed to represent - at least in my little part of the cosmos - is one of the reasons it has lost it's way.

The battle over the centre ground is key to winning elections. There's no point pretending otherwise but I'd argue that a good politician representing a party that has built a coherent political identity for itself should be capable of going out and selling policies that aren't necessarily within the electoral comfort zone. That politician should be able to argue against convential wisdom and be able to present a genuine alternative, as opposed to a diet version of someone elses policies.

Yes, it is a harder path to travel but since when should we be afraid of the harder path?