A welcome promised in Hastings for disgruntled Lib Dem voters
Ed Miliband has much more than winning the Labour leadership in his sights. He is convinced he can complete the first realignment in British politics since the Social Democratic Party of David Owen and Roy Jenkins left Labour in 1981.
"There is a progressive majority in this country; we did not secure enough of it at this year's election," he told The Independent. "I am uniquely well placed to heal the split there was in 1981 with the SDP, and win back people from the Liberal Democrats to Labour.
"We have seen half of a realignment of politics, with what Cameron has done with Clegg. The other half can happen with me as Labour leader, because I think I can offer a home to former Liberal Democrats and bring together a social democratic economic policy, redistribution, greater equality and putting individual liberty at the centre of who we are."
Why is he so well qualified? Because he shares the Liberal Democrats' agenda on civil liberties, ID cards, the detention of terrorist suspects without charge and university tuition fees, he replies. "The Liberal Democrats are on a journey. Clegg is taking them in a direction a lot of Lib Dem supporters are deeply dismayed about," he said.
"I offer a home for Liberal Democrat voters in which they don't have to trade abolition of ID cards for a reactionary assault on the welfare state, and they can be true to their values on both civil liberties and economic policy."
We are speaking as he spends three hours on trains from London to Hastings and back, so that he can address 150 of Labour's 400 local members for just 75 minutes. It is typical of the gruelling, 24/7 schedules as the five candidates to succeed Gordon Brown criss-cross the country. They have spoken together at 50 hustings meetings and there are six more to come before the result is announced on 25 September. It is possible, Ed Miliband's team calculates, that he could speak to about half the party's 160,000 members during the campaign.
In Hastings, he gets a warm welcome in a sweaty, overcrowded seafront hotel room, with standing room only. He also gets some ammunition for his leadership fight with his elder brother David and his hopes of building that "progressive alliance". He is told that the Liberal Democrats have virtually collapsed locally since the Coalition Government was formed, and that Labour, which lost Hastings and Rye to the Tories in May, would win it today with just some of the 7,825 people who voted Liberal Democrat.
Moreover, Labour lost the seat because only 50 per cent of voters turned out in local council estates, compared to 80 per cent in more affluent parts of the constituency. "It wasn't just in Hastings," Mr Miliband tells his audience. "It was actually the least affluent voters we lost, not the more affluent voters."
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