Labour MPs have to stop being silly. To try and change leader now would be an electoral gamble too far, more especially because there is no obvious candidate in sight. Labour’s greatest risk comes from the thirty plus seats it is on target to lose in Scotland and it is there that it has to shore up support.
This is not to say Milliband does not have a credibility problem. He has but he has passed the point of no return and he and his party have now to do the best they can. The elected Senate was a good start for a simple and dramatic policy, but it is a bit outside the sphere of interest of ordinary folk in a cost of living crisis. What is needed now is stuff like taking power generation and network distribution back into public ownership in the style of Railtrack, while leaving retail sales open to competition. Making all doctors NHS employees working exclusively for the NHS would transform the health service and should be on the Labour list. A mansion tax is good as would be a turnover tax replacing corporation tax. What is no good is all the fiddly little tinkerings Labour offers, none of which add up to much and which nobody can remember.
It is worth remembering to that only three Labour leaders have ever won a majority at the ballot box for the Labour Movement. Attlee, Wilson and Blair. And they won because the country had had enough of the Conservatives in 1945, 1964 and 1997. Attlee won one more election. Wilson three more and Blair two more. The two Labour leaders who took over when Labour was in power, Callaghan and Brown, both lost and lost big. By contrast three Conservative leaders who took over power, Eden, Macmillan, and Major all won. Only Lord Home, (later Sir Alec Douglas-Home) lost and then only just.
One of Labour’s strengths is its loyalty to its leaders. The Tories are famous for knifing theirs.