History will judge Ed Milliband less harshly than his contemporaries. He kept the party united while edging it away from the vague nostrums of New Labour, but a failure to articulate a coherent and radical economic policy was fatal, especially in Scotland. His loyalty to Ed Balls cost Labour the election and Balls his seat. But the biggest mistake of all was for Milliband to resign when he did. For now we have a Labour party making a spectacle of itself; or put more precisely we have New Labour seeing that its time is up, determined to bring all of Labour down with it.
The idea of throwing voting in the election of leader open to anyone who wishes to take part was an inspired arrempt to extend the party’s reach and appeal and to reconnect it with the voters who had turned from it in despair. Inevitably there will be spoilers who think they can skew the result and nutters who register their pets to vote. So what? The only requirement should have been for the voter to be on the electoral register. The reports that tens of thousands are being rejected for no good reason, many lifelong Labour supporters, others new converts, in the drive to weed out a mythical army of Tory activists and a few dozen goldfish and lamas shows a shocking immaturity among those running the vetting process.
It was a feature of New Labour that everything was controlled from the centre and spun in advance. Even the Cabinet was lied to and hoodwinked. It is to be hoped that the outcome of the election will be decisive and final and that adherents to one of the most cynical and incompetent political themes in British political history will be driven out. If not the trade unions, who founded the Labour Movement and have funded it from the beginning, might have to start over again from scratch.