Two local boys but it’s only Ed Miliband that made good

Published: 30 September, 2010

LABOUR Party members from Camden have praised their new leader Ed Miliband for denouncing the Iraq War as they swung behind the “local boy’s” new regime

Frank Dobson, the Holborn and Pancras MP who made Mr Miliband his first preference in the leadership contest, said: “I am delighted Ed won because for me he was the best candidate. 

“One of his first jobs for the Labour Party was delivering leaflets for me. I have nothing against David, I’ve known him a long time, I just thought his brother was better.”

The MP acknowledged that the issue of Iraq had a bearing on the leadership contest, which saw former Foreign Secretary David Miliband – who was in the Cabinet when the invasion was agreed – lose by just 1 per cent of the vote after second and third preferences were counted.

“The war in Iraq was wrong and it was unpopular. When you have those two things combined, you are not following a good course,” said Mr Dobson.

Along with a raft of politicians from Camden, Town Hall leader Councillor Nash Ali was in the hall when Ed Miliband spoke to his party conference for the first time on Tuesday here in Manchester.

“He was right to talk about Iraq – I don’t think any Labour Party members in Camden supported the war. It was a difficult issue and he has addressed it,” said Cllr Ali. 

“He did a very good job. In Camden we have are own new generation of councillors that won back the council in May. We did what Ed said the party nationally has to do: we have learned from the mistakes that lost us control of Camden in 2006. 

“We learned the reasons why we lost the election and came back and won it back this year. So, he’s talking our language. He was good in his response to the difficult cuts we will all face and talked about a living wage for the lowest paid, for example, ideas that we have talked about in Camden.”

Cllr Ali added: “The party will now get together behind him. The Ed and David thing is over.”

Mr Miliband, who lives in Dartmouth Park with his partner Justine and toddler son Daniel, was also supported by Hampstead and Kilburn MP Glenda Jackson who predicts in an article for the New Journal (see page 19) that he will win a “significant majority” at the next election, a view seen as far-fetched and out of touch by the party’s opponents in Camden.

“Ed Miliband is not ‘Red Ed’ – he is ‘our Ed’, and under his leadership I am sure that Labour can win back the confidence of the British public, and secure a significant majority at the next election,” writes Ms Jackson. “He will usher in a bright new era for the Labour Party and for the people of this country to whom, under Ed’s leadership, we will offer a range of opportunities which are currently being denied by the Coalition.”

Members from Camden, where there are two of the largest constituency parties in the country, took active roles in the leadership campaigns. Councillor Tulip Siddiq was one of only a handful of paid workers on Ed Miliband’s campaign. She helped pull off an event at Haverstock which those who attended say cemented belief in his ability to go on and pip his brother to the post.

Perversely, despite the support of well-known faces in Camden, Mr Miliband did not win the most first preference votes from those eligible to vote in Camden. Instead, David Miliband, in a pattern mirrored across London, scooped up more first-choice selections across the borough’s two parliamentary constituencies.

That said, if the vote had been restricted to Camden alone, the same internal electoral rules would have still handed Ed victory on second and third preferences.

Camden finance chief Councillor Theo Blackwell said he had voted for David Miliband but added: “David was ready and Ed isn’t the finished article yet but there are five years to go to the election – he’s a great guy – and he will be by then.” 

He said Ed Miliband’s speech on Tuesday had offered an olive branch to “lost Liberals”. 

Kentish Town councillor Georgia Gould was among the others who voted for David Miliband but pledged to “unite behind” the new leader.

Around the conference precinct in Manchester, fortified by armed police and security cordons, Ed’s victory over David dominated the proceedings. In corridors and hotel lobbies, David Miliband supporters talked of a “missed opportunity” and members not wrapped up in the intoxicating party spirit of late nights at conference said there was a subdued, flat atmosphere. 

One Camden member said: “Some people saw David give a speech on Monday and thought, ‘Shit, what have we done?’ The publication of all the memoirs that came out during the campaign did not help David Miliband. People were reminded of Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair – and they thought how can I hurt Tony Blair.”

There is also a feeling that David Miliband was left in the awkward – some say unfair – position where he found it difficult to land deep criticisms of a member of his family without appearing cold-hearted, whereas Ed was free to attack the previous ­government’s record, particularly on the emotive and decisive issue of Iraq.

From his home in Primrose Hill, David yesterday (Wednesday) announced his decision not to serve in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet.

Camden’s contingent in Manchester, however, remained largely upbeat. Kilburn councillor Mike Katz said: “For me, Ed’s speech reinforced my view that we have the right man for the job. 

“A key line that I took away from it was that we are optimistic about the future and that’s how we have been working in Camden.”

Soap and glory – How Miliband drama took over

PO-FACED Labour members tell journalists to stop going on about the Miliband brothers, ordering us not to reduce the leadership of their beloved party to a soap opera squabble. 

A bit hypocritical given those same members were so transfixed on the screens around conference centre and in the main hall itself on Monday, watching David Miliband deliver his brotherly love on the stage and effectively issue a dewy-eyed farewell. As he ramped up the emotion with a speech everybody said was better than anything he conjured up during his campaign, members could not look away. They were absolutely hooked, themselves wet around the eyelids. For all their high-minded claims of moving beyond the movie scripts, they were the ones most fascinated by the storyline of a younger brother fighting vote for vote to defeat his more assured sibling.

Former Highgate Labour councillor Maggie Cosin, who now lives in Kent, shook her head, lamenting a missed opportunity for her party as David M left the stage. Still, her ultimate dream would be to see Tony Blair back at the helm.

The fascination with Miliband vs Miliband took over this conference. Decent debates heard at previous conferences in the main hall and at fringe meetings descended into a series of speakers saying one of three things in a sliding scale of colourful language: Conservatives=bad, Lib Dems=bad or Daily Mail=bad. 

No need to talk about the future of council housing or how the NHS should be structured to avoid hospitals like the Whittington risking losing celebrated services, the best way to unite seemed to be to hate the enemy together.

If this was a forum for ordinary members to feed into the national party’s direction, the conference failed.

Yet everyone there knew that wasn’t the main objective, for this year at least. It certainly achieved what Ed Miliband and most of the party’s supporters would have wanted. The checklist virtually full of ticked boxes: 1. New leader installed. 2. Lines drawn under the Iraq War with admission that it was wrong. 3. Members united against common enemy (not Tony Blair or Gordon Brown). 4. Disco. 5. Happy journey home.

So even though a lot of the delegates leaving Manchester could not tell you confidently what Ed Miliband wants, whether he is red or not, nor what the future holds, there is enthusiasm for the task of winning for Labour. There is appetite for the battle ahead.

And members in Camden feel at the forefront of that. It explains why so many travelled north this week. Having won back control of the council in May, they already have a fresh generation in place.

Representing the new leader’s home borough and with only a few veterans of administrations past, they feel in the thick of Ed’s new operation whatever that may bring.

Oo, no! King to reign as our next MP?

• In his first conference speech Ed Miliband told his boring old skit about Oona King being too cool to hang around with him and his brother David when the three were all studying together at Haverstock School. Oona launched her doomed bid to become the Mayor of London at the Chalk Farm secondary, aka Labour’s Eton. But how will she follow up being beaten to the nomination by Ken Livingstone? Insider mutterings this week said the obvious choice would be an attempted return to the House of Commons – and as she loves her Camden heritage so much – what about Holborn and St Pancras where Frank Dobson admits he won’t go on and on and on. Oona. Our MP? “Over several hundred dead bodies,” said one local councillor at conference.

• Poor old Theo Blackwell, the Gospel Oak councillor who left his booking too late to secure conference accommodation inside the security cordon. The big Arsenal fan didn’t realise the view from the hotel room he ended up in would-be Man United’s Old Trafford home!

• Labour councillors queued up to see the Red Flag raised above Camden Town Hall earlier this month when it was lifted in honour of Ellen Luby, the pensioner campaigner who died after a lifetime of left-wing heckles. Is it coincidence that whispers at conference have it that the Daily Mail has since asked under Freedom of Information Act for the council’s policy on flag-waving? There’s a scoop worth seeing.

• Should they? Shouldn’t they? The now familiar group conference picture for the New Journal camera was taken on Monday but members couldn’t make up their mind whether Camden and Islington councillors should huddle together for the snap. What kind of message would a cross-border group put across when the two authorities are about to share a chief executive? It’s not immediately clear why it was something to quarrel over, but to avoid interfering in any internal dispute, we took one with and one without.

• No wine in the Midland Hotel for well-regarded former Labour social services chief Geethika Jayatilaka. She was determined to attend conference even though she is heavily pregnant with her second baby. Not much chance of the little one growing up a Tory: the father is high-flying lawyer and former council chief Raj Chada – a beautiful romance which first blossomed on Camden’s green benches. It must have made all those overview and scrutiny meetings bearable.

• Did someone at Labour head office get an angry phone call from Hampstead and Kilburn MP Glenda Jackson? Her name didn’t seem to appear on the official leadership voting records published online by the Labour Party earlier in the week. Instead, her votes seemed to be attributed to Mrs G Hodges MP. Ms Jackson divorced film-maker Roy Hodges in the 1970s. Yesterday, Mrs Hodges had dropped off the list and Mrs Jackson had appeared.

Kids taught in ‘rotting classrooms’

Teacher highlights ‘ghastly’ conditions at top-rated school

A TEACHER spelt out his fears for one of Camden’s top performing secondary schools from the stage of the Labour Party conference in Manchester yesterday, warning that pupils would be learning in buildings “rotting from the inside out”.

John Blake, who works at top-rated Parliament Hill School in Dartmouth Park – a stone’s throw from the home of new Labour leader Ed Miliband – took a stand after staff were told a renovation project had been axed by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government.

Despite its outstanding record, Parliament Hill is considered by staff at the school and politicians at the Town Hall to be one of the biggest losers in cuts worth more than £170million previously pledged to Camden’s schools.

Mr Blake said designs for new improved buildings would now gather dust without support from Education Secretary Michael Gove.

“Our school has been left with a 40-year-old building rotting from the inside out; a ghastly glass greenhouse which boils in summer and freezes in winter,” he said. “We still have defunct buildings riddled with asbestos – we don’t use them any more, of course, but inner-city schools don’t have the space to keep buildings they can’t use.”

It is the first time a teacher from Camden has spoken so openly and publicly – and politically – about the “devastating blow” schools feel they have been dealt.

The funding was linked to Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme, celebrated as an inspirational by its founders for giving the chance to all schools in Britain to upgrade, but condemned as bloated and bureaucratic by critics.

 Mr Gove said that in a climate of cuts there was little option but to curb the scheme which gave schools the chance to improve classrooms, sports facilities and drama rooms. But Parliament Hill was considered an important case because the school was not asking for luxury new science labs or lecture theatres, but a long-awaited overhaul to rotting classrooms.

Mr Blake said: “We now have a set of fantastic blueprints, the product of incredible effort from staff, students and parents, led by our extremely dedicated headteacher, to design a school for our future, which we may never see become a real­ity. We won’t be able to do all that we had hoped for our students, especially the most deprived.”

Labour members say the money is being diverted to Mr Gove’s plans for “free schools” – independent new schools set up by community groups and parents in areas of pupil place shortages. Their argument is that money should be spent on bringing existing schools up to scratch.

Mr Blake added in his speech, in front of Ed Balls, the former education secretary: “If we are going to ask children who are heirs to generations of educational alienation as many of my students are, to come to school and respect the education they receive and value the opportunities we hope to provide them, then we have to show that we respect them by giving them with an environment fit to learn in. The Building Schools for the Future money has been stolen by Michael Gove to fund his pet project, ‘free schools’. 

“We will be having a free school in Camden. Never a thing less accurately named. That school won’t be free – it will be bought at the cost of a decaying infrastructure of the schools that already exist in our borough. It will be bought at the cost of a breathtaking betrayal of the children of Camden.”

Camden Labour’s youth delegate  Peter Ptashko met Ed Balls yesterday at the conference and discussed cuts to primary schools. 

A governor at Fleet School in Gospel Oak, he said: “The poor state of the building gives negative messages to staff, pupils and both current and potential parents. The school staff work very hard to counteract social deprivation and increase pupil’s life chances – but the very fabric of the building and the constant need for repairs is a serious hindrance.”