Ed Miliband's Speech Highlights Labour's Eternal Division

Ed Miliband's speech has at least got him noticed - lots of juicy and provocative themes to get the media talking.  But I can't help thinking that the whole tone and thrust of the speech highlights the division that has lurked at the heart of the Labour Party since its inception.

Ed Miliband's speech has at least got him noticed - lots of juicy and provocative themes to get the media talking.  But I can't help thinking that the whole tone and thrust of the speech highlights the division that has lurked at the heart of the Labour Party since its inception.

That's the split between what might be called the 'governors' and the 'fighters'.  The governors feel instinctively that Labour needs to be in power or it is nothing and to get there it needs to sound and feel like a credible government-in-waiting to the electorate.  It means addressing directly and boldly the aspects of the party that dent Labour's credibility while sounding authoritative on the key issues of current debate. 

The fighters on the other hand feel instinctively that Labour should stand up for its traditional constituency, stick by its core principles and take the fight to the powerful and to the Tories.

The governors feel in their bones that a Labour leader should talk to the voters as much about how Labour can now be trusted as what the Government is doing wrong. The fighters feel in their bones that leaders should focus almost entirely on undermining the Government by hook or by crook.

Although the natural break between these two elements normally falls along standard right and left lines,  Ed M's speech today broke with this normality. Much of what he said could be regarded as pretty right wing and would have had the left wincing (the move away from social housing allocated on basis of need particularly so).  But the tone was still of the fighter ethos - it was all about Labour being on the side of the hard working contributors to society against energy cartels, against welfare scroungers, against bankers and, of course, against the Tories. 

Indeed, the aspect which might fall most naturally from the mouths of the governor tendency - the need to regain credibility on the deficit - only lasted for thirteen lines and was ushered out of the way very near the beginning of the speech.

For those reasons I think the speech will probably quietly increase the worries senior figures in the Party (many of whom are firmly in the governor camp) have about Miliband's leadership. And as I've mentioned before, I'm not sure the fighter approach does much for public debate nor necessarily translates into votes.