26 Sep 2011

Friends of Ed and values of the left

I’ve been writing for a while about how Ed Miliband wants to move the centre ground of British politics to the left. They’re not his words and you won’t hear them this week.

But that’s what he’s about and on Tuesday you’ll see him starting on the process, effectively holding up a looking mirror to the British public and saying look, when you think about it you are actually against fast-buck capitalism, your values are my values – the values of the left.

I think it’s what his father would’ve called “false consciousness.” It’ll be a very different sort of speech from the one his last two predecessors would’ve delivered. They both decided the country was fundamentally centre-right and, many of Ed M’s intellectual friends think they got locked into a mindset of trying Labourism by stealth.

All of this is relevant to a fringe meeting I had this lunchtime with Ed M’s intellectual guru, Maurice Glasman. Listening to Lord Glasman’s intellectual pyrotechnics you got a flavour of the three-hour brainstorms that happen on Sundays every few weeks at Ed Miliband’s north London home.

Read more: ‘Ed Miliband has an angry, insurgent side’

Will it all make sense or seem relevant to ordinary folk who catch clips on tomorrow night’s bulletins? Ed Miliband joked at the weekend that he’d be careful to weed out wonkish phrases from his erudite friends in the final product.

I didn’t get the chance after the lunchtime fringe meeting with Maurice Glasman to pass on his thoughts. He said he thought that 65 per cent of public sector unions’ time was wasted on looking after people who probably should be sacked (i.e. fighting tribunals etc) rather than nurturing young talent.

He said he still thought that there should be a new EU treaty that stops the free movement of labour in the EU and that his discussions with EU social democrats suggested some thinking was converging about the need for radical change in the EU.

He gave a feel for those three-hour intellectual breeze-shooting “Friends of Ed” sessions. Some might think they sound like the stuff of senior common rooms not the corridors of power. You can see more here.

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