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David Miliband is likeable, intelligent, articulate, but the wrong person to lead Britain.    New Labour to the core, he is the heir to the Blairite inheritance which is now so profoundly unpopular with the Labour Movement that it lost the party 5 million votes by the time of its demise this year.   Labour clearly needs to change to win back public support, but a vote for David is a step back into a  failed and repudiated project that no longer has traction.   We should learn from that failure, not seek to repeat it.   His brother Ed shows clear signs that he can do that, and as the only other candidate who can win, that is overwhelmingly the reason to support him.

New Labour was rejected for very good reasons.   It failed Britain because it re-regulated the banks and allowed the City far too much power, which led directly to the financial crash.   It let inequality rip because (in Mandelson’s notorious phrase) it was too relaxed about the filthy rich and too ineffective about child poverty.   It pursued the privatisation of all Britain’s public services and allowed the collapse of affordable housing.   It embraced a market fundamentalism which subordinated labour rights to corporate power.   By outflanking every Tory or Daily Mail threat by adopting their ideas wholesale, its triangulation and unerring hostility to civil freedoms finally alientated even the middle class support it so assiduously courted.   And then New Labour’s (Blair’s) slavish devotion to every tuen and twist of US (Bush’s) foreign policy led inexorably to the Iraqi and Afghan morass.

Out of that suffocating atmosphere Ed is a breath of fresh air.   He has denounced the Iraq war.   He has strongly promoted a Living Wage to tackle inequality at the bottom and a High Pay Commission to tackle inequality at the top.   He wants to separate High Street from casino banking which is essential to reform the City of London and to protect the country from another even bigger crash.   He recognises that of Labour’s 5 million votes lost, 4 million were from poor and low-income working families so that winning those votes back is not retreating into a comfort zone but simply avoiding political suicide.   He is determined to keep a publicly owned Royal Mail and to create a Post Office Bank.   He wants the right to flexible working for all employees, not just some.   In opposition to higher tuition fees he is advocating a graduate tax.

For all these reasons and many more, if Labour is to recover its fundamental values and vision, it really matters that Ed wins, as he has every chance of doing.   Vote for him!