Labour party conference: the future not the past

Polls have begun to show the Conservatives level pegging, and the unions, the leader and policy all need to be addressed

- Editorial
- The Guardian, Friday 20 September 2013 17.38 EDT
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This is not the buildup to the Labour conference that Ed Miliband wanted. Stage left, his former Treasury colleague, Damian McBride, goes public in the Daily Mail, doubtless for big bucks, with poisonous stories of the smear campaigns and dark arts that were always at the heart of the Gordon Brown political machine. Stage right, the former Team Blair official Ben Wegg-Prosser shares a trove of emails with the Guardian that vividly rekindle the atmosphere of mutual loathing that ate away at the Blair-Brown party after 2005. There will be more to come from Mr McBride's racy book. It is a reminder of the worst aspects of Labour's gang warfare years through which Mr Miliband rose. Seen against the internecine backdrop illuminated in Mr McBride's and Mr Wegg-Prosser's accounts, Mr Miliband's act of political fratricide in 2010 somehow feels less extraordinary and more like par for the course.

Yet the past is not really Mr Miliband's biggest headache. It's the present and the future that he needs to worry about more. Mr Miliband will undoubtedly be heading to Brighton determined to say that the events depicted by Mr McBride belong emphatically to the party's past. That was the TB-GB then, he will claim. Labour today, by contrast, inhabits the One Nation, One Party, One Leader now, a culture from which rivalries, smears, unattributable briefings and every form of political knifework has been purged. But there is a problem. Mr Miliband's happy-clappy Labour party is arriving in Brighton just as the polls begin to show the Conservatives level pegging. Since the start of 2011, there has hardly been an opinion poll that did not show Labour ahead. This week, that changed. Labour is right to feel nervous.

Three main issues face Mr Miliband and his party over the coming days. The first is how to handle the relationship with the unions, an issue which the Labour leader reopened over Falkirk. Mr Miliband soothed the unions at the TUC by not having much more to say. This week's vacuous interim report by Ray Collins, who has the job of drawing up the plans that Mr Miliband will put to a special conference in the spring, reads like an attempt to park the issue during Labour conference week too. But the longer that Mr Miliband delays, the more he will be accused of bottling it and the harder it will be to regain control of the issue.

The second issue, umbilically linked to the first, is the leader himself. This is a particularly important conference for the man who 67% of voters think is doing a bad job and who 33% of Labour voters think is not up to the job of prime minister. Mr Miliband is a sympathetic and thoughtful leader. He has done some brave things, notably on phone hacking and Syria. But he has not managed to cut it yet as a retail politician. He has to shift some of those bad ratings if he is emerge at or near the top of the pile in 2015. In spite of Ukip's shambolic conference yesterday, the rise of Nigel Farage has probably put the kibosh on any televised leaders' debates in 2015. So Mr Miliband has surprisingly few big opportunities before the next election of presenting himself to the public as a potential prime minister. One of those comes with his leader's speech on Tuesday. For his sake, and for Labour's, it had better be a good one.

Which brings us to policy and direction. The most important issue facing Labour this week is to tell a clear and consistent version of the alternative options facing Britain as the recovery – or pre-election boom – begins to consolidate. Last year, Mr Miliband found some one-nation language to frame that effort – but there has been little substantive follow-up. The result is deep uncertainty, and some scepticism, about what a Labour government would actually do. In the interim, both the Tories and, last week, the Liberal Democrats have begun to shape the argument. Labour's big speakers this week have to fill in some of the blanks that they have left empty for far too long.