After a summer for Labour to forget, Ed Miliband’s fightback will begin at next month’s TUC conference. Today’s Times reports that the Miliband will address the annual union gathering for the second time (having first done so in 2011) on 10 September.
At first there might some be glee among the Tories that the Labour leader has, as the paper puts it, “chosen an audience of union bosses” to hear his first speech since the party’s recent woes began. But it’s worth pointing out how the occasion could work to his advantage.
Every time Miliband has addressed a large gathering of trade unionists since becoming Labour leader he has been booed and heckled (at the 2011 anti-cuts march, at the 2011 TUC conference and at the 2012 anti-cuts march), usually after warning that the party will have to keep most of the coalition’s spending cuts and make some of its own. After the Labour leader’s recent clashes with Unite over Falkirk and his pledge to match the coalition’s current spending plans for 2015-16, it would be surprising if history did not repeat itself.
While the Tories might try to present this as evidence that Miliband is a “weak” leader who presides over a divided party it would sit uneasily with their recent narrative that it’s Len McCluskey and co. who call the shots in Labour. Far from writing the party’s policies (as the Tories would have it), McCluskey has entirely failed to persuade Miliband to embrace his “no cuts” stance. A common joke among Unite activists is that they wish they were as influential as the Tories claim.
After months in which he has been framed as a leader in hock to the unions, footage of Miliband being booed could be just what he needs to expose the Tories’ fantasies.
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