2011 is full of opportunity for Ed Miliband

The Ipsos MORI poll that claims Ed Miliband is the least popular Leader of the Opposition since Iain Duncan Smith is not great news for the Labour leader, but it's hardly terminal either.

What the graph (right) shows is that recent party leaders - with the exception of Tony Blair - have all faced difficult periods in the polls. I think Miliband will feel that he has a chance to reform his party in the same way that Cameron has changed the Conservative Party during his leadership. Miliband should be confident that he will follow Cameron's trajectory, and see Labour into the next election in 2015 with a reinvigorated Labour Party behind him.

He'll also - if he actually believes in his key economic message about cuts and it isn't just political expediency - be certain that come 2015 he'll be facing a Conservative Party in government as unpopular as the Labour Party under Gordon Brown. So I don't think Miliband will be too unhappy with these figures. He will be wary, however, of falling below -20, because when that happened to IDS, Hague and Howard they never recovered.

He will also be buoyed by the figures that show 53% of Labour members are satisfied with his leadership. He should be confident of converting some of the 25% of Labour members who 'don't know' (how you can have no opinion is beyond me) into 'satisfied' supporters of his leadership over the coming year.

The overall figures, which show that opinion is split on his leadership, are an opportunity for Miliband rather than a death knell. Electoral politics is all about convincing people that you're right and he still has the time to do it.

Yet if I was Ed Miliband I would still have some serious concerns. I'd be less worried about how I appeared to the country, and more concerned how I appeared to my backbenchers and shadow cabinet colleagues. I'd also be afraid that the absence of concrete Labour policies in many areas would blunt my political attacks. So, in the spirit of Christmas, in anticipation of an exciting 2011 and in the hope that the opposition will force the government to raise its game, here are five suggestions to get Miliband's leadership moving in the right direction:

1. Ed Miliband must improve his PMQs performances in the New Year. Whatever he is doing now isn't working. If he does this he will begin to convince his backbenchers that he can actually compete nationally with David Cameron.

2. He needs to bring Balls and Cooper closer to his leadership, because at the moment they are not in his inner circle and are just itching to prove themselves better potential leaders. Plus they are in portfolios where, frankly, their talents are completely wasted. One of them at least has to replace Johnson in the shadow Treasury role if they ever want to get close to Osborne.

3. Stop picking on the Liberal Democrats. He claims to want to woo disaffected Lib Dems but he always goes for the easy line in the media or at PMQs and picks on them for some perceived 'U-turn'. Miliband should never forget that the coalition has a Conservative majority, and that they must be his primary target.

4. Choose a few policy areas and ruthlessly demonstrate to the public how the government has taken the wrong options. Eric Pickles' reforms to local government are the most radical changes to the structure of government in the UK in years, and the government has no idea how its localism agenda will turn out. The restructuring of the NHS is potentially disastrous and the changes to education are being very poorly executed. Lansley and Gove should be easy targets for their Labour shadow ministers.

5. Get real distance from the unions. If they are actually serious when they talk of huge coordinated strike action in 2011 then it would be toxic for the Labour leader to get too close. Cameron will be looking to paint Ed Miliband as a union man helping undermine the economic recovery with reckless strikes. He must avoid this. 

Boxing Day Tube Strike

Is this a good idea? Unions exist to get the best deal for their members by bargaining collectively. Tube drivers want to be paid triple and get a day in lieu for working on December 26th. So will going on strike on Boxing Day get drivers these concessions?

No. It's pretty certain that they won't. Tube bosses have seen off quite a few strikes recently and they're unlikely to buckle over this one. The reason? The public has very little support for the strikers. Why would they? The strikers cost businesses in London millions of pounds. They cause misery for millions of people who are trying to get to work or to see loved ones. This strike could upset what is one of the most important days of the year for retailers. 

I do understand that the drivers want these concessions. But I think that unions have lost perspective on what should be cause for a strike. You really can't expect to have all, or even most, of your demands met: you are not in charge. Going on strike is a nuclear option. It should only be used in the most extreme circumstances. This really is not one of those circumstances. Neither was it when the London Underground management chose to restructure the staffing at tube stations. That was their prerogative. 

If you go on strike too often then your management will simply think you're being unreasonable. And so it will stand up to you. And once it has realised that it can do that, and that when it does the public does not blame it but blames the unions and the strikers, then they will never give in to strikers. And your most powerful negotiating tool is rendered useless. 

This is even more pertinent because unions managed to continue striking even when the economy was in good shape. Now that it isn't, and the Government's cuts are about to hit the public sector, we're probably about to see more strikes. These would be a lot more effective in changing public opinion if unions were able to convince people that they only went on strike for serious reasons. But because of strikes like the one on Boxing Day they won't have the effect they might have done. 

Scabs?

Two days ago I posted about the unions inability to garner support at a national level thanks to their outdated and reactionary responses to, well, everything. Now have a look at this short video of the Fire Brigade Union (FBU) strike on Saturday at Southwark in London. 


Frankly, it's sickening. A group of angry grown men standing around chanting 'SCAB!' at firefighters who had the temerity not to strike. 

Today the FBU has again walked out of negotiations with the London Fire Brigade (LFB) and looks set to go ahead with it's 47-hour strike starting on 5 November, which is the most active period of the year for firefighters because of Guy Fawkes night. David Cameron has branded the strikes 'irresponsible' and I wouldn't be surprised if there are now increasing calls for the fire service to be classified as an essential service alongside the police and the NHS and prevented from striking. Boris Johnson's calls for new strike legislation will also get a boost. 

Yet again we're seeing unions screw up their chances by resorting to strike action which has minimal public support. Even Labour has been mute on the strikes, so poisonous are they to public opinion. 

To strike you need a really solid public argument and a great narrative. The FBU don't. The LFB want to change the focus of the fire service so that they prioritise fire prevention, rather than fire response. So they are altering the shift pattern to make workers do 12 hours during the day instead of 9. That's pretty much it: a strategic decision made by management about how the service should function. 

It's not enough to go on strike about - and certainly not at the busiest time of the year. They also managed to have an RMT union banner at the Southwark strike. Which suggests Bob Crow's widely despised militant union was out to support the firefighters. Which is illegal. And even if it wasn't illegal because no-one from the union was there in an official capacity, the RMT is so disliked by Londoners that it was, again, PR suicide. 

But they'll go on fighting a losing battle. The LFB will win because it has public and political support from across the spectrum. It's another fight poorly picked by the unions. 

Watch out Cardiff...

Len McCluskey of the Unite Union has accused Iain Duncan Smith of being unable to shake of the 'vicious Tory determination to make the poor suffer' and said that 'It is clear that the Tory nasty party has never gone away'. The PCS union was equally aggressive, taking the obvious line by calling IDS a 'Tebbit clone'.

What did IDS do to deserve this attack? He suggested that people may not be being realistic if they waited for a job to become available in their home town: 'The truth is there are jobs. They may not absolutely be in the town you are living in. They may be in a neighbouring town... We need to recognise the jobs often don't come to you. Sometimes you need to go to the jobs.' Using Merthyr Tydfil as an example, he said people had become 'static' and that they 'didn't know if they got on a bus an hour's journey they'd be in Cardiff and they could look for a job there.'

McCluskey then pulled out my personal favourite comment: 'Cant the ConDem coalition really believe that the unemployment being created by savage government cuts will be fixed by having people wandering across the country with their meagre possessions crammed into the luggage racks of buses?'

You've got to love the unions. I mean, they're great when they're defending an individual teacher falsely accused by a student or a council employee hounded out by an overbearing chief executive, but they just lose the plot when it comes to national issues. The simple PR problem they have is that people switch off when they hear rhetoric like that. No-one really believes that there will be Indian-like bus trips with bundles of luggage falling from the roof down the M4 to Cardiff, it's just not credible...

Labour's Legacy

The BBC's main headline today is that the coalition's spending cuts will 'hit the north harder'. I'm sure that comes as a big shock to all of us, especially if taken in conjunction with the Daily Mail's story from yesterday discussing figures that suggest 24 per cent of north eastern households have no inhabitants in work.

The overall UK figure is that there are 3.9 million households where no adult works. In these households there are 5.4 million adults and 1.9 million children. This has led to fears that there are children being brought up knowing nothing other than benefits.

Their reliance on the state will obviously mean that northern areas will suffer the initial brunt of cuts. The problem for the coalition is that while it is rightly seeking to review benefits and to force those wrongly on incapacity benefit back to work there are not enough jobs in these areas to accommodate the current unemployed, let alone the newly unemployed.

Predictably, the Labour party and the unions are condemning the cuts as unfair and ideologically driven. They say that the government is risking the recovery and hitting the poorest hardest. Each attack of this nature is frankly an admission that Labour failed to help the poorest in society, and that it failed to build an economy that would protect the most vulnerable people in the most at risk areas of the country.

It's not that I dislike Labour - indeed it has much to commend it - it's just that they had 13 years of government to make an impact on this. 13 years to make the north and other areas less reliant on the state for jobs and to make people less reliant on the state for welfare. They failed to do that. It was a mistake that was compounded by their economic policies, which were based on faulty underlying assumptions about the cyclical nature of growth and led them to borrow and spend too much money. For them to now sit in opposition and bleat about cuts is not credible. It's too easy in opposition just to be opportunistic, and their party is becoming ever more so as it seeks to redefine itself. I just hope they stop when they eventually elect a new leader.

One person, one vote?

I guess it's up to the Labour Party to decide exactly how it runs its leadership election, but its strange voting system is getting a bit of flack in the papers today.

It seems as though many individuals have more than one vote for leader. This is possible because the vote is split between unions and socialist societies, who have 1/3 of the vote, MPs and MEPs, who have another 1/3, and party members, who have the final 1/3.

So if you are a party member, who's in a union and also a socialist society, then you've got 3 votes. According to the BBC, some people have as many as seven votes.

When Mandelson and the other modernisers got rid of the union block vote back in 1993 they did it under the banner of 'one member one vote', or its catchy acronym, OMOV. I'm not sure that this was what they intended.

I understand the system, but I worry that it looks corrupt. Perception is everything in politics. That people can vote more than once in the same election will give the public the impression that the result isn't even a fair reflection of the views of the Labour Party. It would be much better if they simply divided the vote up between MPs and MEPs on the one hand and party members on the other. If they are desperate to keep the unions, then give the leaders of the major ones votes equivalent to those of MPs and MEPs.