Bridging the Divide: Ed Miliband and Ideas

The third chapter notes the intellectual exhaustion of New Labour leading into the 2010 General Election and the attempts to renew the party outside of the leadership circle. It focuses on Ed Miliband’s leadership and the ideas that he engaged with. In particular, there is an analysis of Blue Labour and One Nation.

A Crisis of the Transfer State?

One of the consequences of the financial crisis was that redistributive market liberalism came under challenge from a number of directions. At a practical level, the rising budget deficit limited the scope for further increases in cash transfers; at a discursive level, Conservative politicians successfully challenged New Labour’s focus on income poverty and recast tax credits as a form of ‘welfare’. The coalition government cut working-age benefits and focused on boosting take-home pay by raising the tax threshold, whilst Labour leader Ed Miliband took up the ‘predistribution’ agenda championed by the Harvard political scientist Jacob Hacker. However, the development of Universal Credit and mounting interest in Universal Basic Income suggests that talk of a ‘crisis of the transfer state’ would be premature. Indeed, the growing difficulties which the Conservatives have faced in cutting social security spending shows that in some respects the transfer state has proved to be highly resilient.

Selecting the labour leader

The article aims at assessing the functioning and characteristics of the most recent systems employed by the British Labour Party for selecting its leader. To this end I compared five leadership races: the huge success of Tony Blair in 1994 in the newly reformed electoral college system; the undisputed election of Gordon Brown in 2007; the narrow and disputed victory of Ed Miliband in 2010, still held under the electoral college system; the large but controversial successes of Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 and 2016 closed primaries. The article first traces the evolution of the Labour leadership election systems in recent decades. Secondly, the five leadership races are analyzed and compared, taking into account two main variables: inclusiveness and divisiveness. These have been addressed looking at indicators such as selectorate and candidacy inclusiveness, campaign negativity, race competitiveness and elite attitude, which transversally affects all the other dimensions. The findings suggest that intra-party democracy may be dangerous for party unity and electability but the political context remains much more important than the intrinsic characteristics of the system of leadership selection used.

Constructing social meaning in political discourse: Phonetic variation and verb processes in Ed Miliband's speeches

This article investigates how variation across different levels of linguistic structure indexes ideological alignments in political talk. We analyse two political speeches by Ed Miliband, the former leader of the UK Labour Party, with a focus on the use of /t/-glottalling and the types of verb processes that co-occur with the pronouns we and you. We find substantial differences in the production of /t/ between the two speeches in words such as Britain and government, which have been argued to take on particular salience in British political discourse. We contextualise these findings in terms of metalinguistic discourse surrounding Miliband's language use, as well as how he positions himself in relation to different audiences via verb process types. We show that phonetic variation, subject types, and verb processes work synergistically in allowing Miliband to establish a political persona that is sensitive to ideological differences between different audiences. (Social meaning, indexicality, political discourse, verb processes, phonetic variation, /t/-glottalling)*