Ed Miliband Wins

Ed Miliband has been elected very narrowly as the new Labour Leader. I've not blogged anything about the campaign until now, and for a simple reason - I don't think it matters. It isn't that I don't think it matters because there is no difference between the candidates, I don't think it would have mattered had someone like John McDonnell was standing.

In fact, I was thinking about this the other day, and imagined it in terms of a Game of Fantasy Politics. Imagine you could in the same way just put together your dream Cabinet - Lenin as Prime Minister, Marx as Chancellor, Engels as Industry Minister, Trotsky as Defence Minister, Gramsci as Education Minister, Rosa Luxemburg as Equalities Minister and so on. But, I don't beleive that such a line-up would make more than a marginal difference! Its like those organisations who similarly put forward as their immediate solution the demand for a Workers Government without the slightest thought of where such a Government would come from, who would make it up, and where the popular support for such a solution is to come from!

The only point of a Workers Government, the only point of having a Left-wing Leader of the Labour Party is if that individual is representative of the Party, and if the Party is representative of the working class. If not, then it is merely a token, and an indication of how much work needs to be done to change that situation from the ground-up. I once joked with someone that the Milibrothers were not all they seemed, that they were really part of a left-Wing plot dreamed up by their Father, so that they could become elected PM, and then expose the reality of Parliamentary Socialism as Ralph had analysed it. But, of course, ist precisely that analysis of Ralph Miliband of the idea of Parliamentary Socialism, which shows why the question of Labour Leader is irrelevant. The real transformation that needs to take place is one that only the tens of thousands of LP activists can bring about, through work within their communties to encourage the self-activity of ordinary workers, and thereby to raise their consciousness. Only then will the people they elect on that basis actually reflect anything meaningful. The struggle for Socialism has to take place not within the confines of Parliamentary institutions, but within the hearts and minds of millions of workers, and more immediately in their communities and workplaces.

The task remains to turn the LP outwards to the working class.