James Forsyth James Forsyth

Labour need a message but not Ed’s one

One of the problems besetting this government is that it lacks a narrative; Cabinet Ministers cannot put their policies into context and voters cannot tell what you the government is for. In The Independent today, Andrew Grice argues that a message and a messenger are prerequisites of a Brown recovery and it is hard to disagree.

Ed Miliband’s interview in The Guardian hints at one possible message for Brown. Miliband talks about the importance of showing there is a “Labour way of getting through the downturn.” But what Miliband means by that is just old fashioned governmental solutions. As he says about the new challenges that have emerged since 1997: “All of those demand a role for government, in essentially making the benefits and burdens of those challenges fair. That requires government.” I rather suspect that the public are not yearning for politicians to tell them, In this present crisis, government is the solution to our problem.”

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