Saturday 15 May 2010

Ed Miliband: We lost our sense of progressive mission

The full text of Ed Miliband's speech to the Fabian Society this morning can be read on the main Fabian website.


I will always defend the record of our government because we made this country more prosperous, fairer, greener, more democratic.

I am proud to have been part of that government and we should all be proud of what we achieved

But there is deep thinking we need to do about what went wrong.

But for me there is one central lesson about why we lost.

When Labour succeeds it is through a politics always rooted in our a values and always rooted in the lives of the people of Britain.

And the truth is that as government wore on we lost that sense of progressive mission and of being in touch with people’s concerns.

Think about the things we are proudest of: the minimum wage, investment in healthcare, tax credits, Surestart.

Almost all of those things were a result of decisions made in the very first years of our government.

As time wore on we came to seem more caretakers than idealists—more technocratic than transformative.

And when political parties lose that sense of idealism and mission they become much more vulnerable to the currents of events.

For us, increasingly, because we lost that sense of progressive mission, we found ourselves beached, unable to speak to too many of the concerns of the people of our country.

2 comments:

Leo said...

clearly the stand-out candidate in the field now.... once Jon Cruddas enters into the race, we'll finally, and I mean FINALLY, get to have the conversation we've been craving for years within the Labour party out in the open.

For the sake of further scrutiny, can you put a video/audio link of the speech up asap... thanks

Matt Wardman said...

Having read the speech, I need to know why he has suddenly come to these realisations now, when he is no longer in a position to do anything and holding that view will attract no personal cost.

Many, many people, experts, bloggers etc - as you know - have been telling them this for years, and been treated with scorn.

Why now?