The UK Labour Party has a new, and young, leader. Ed Miliband was a little known public figure, since his job had been more on the inside of the party until he was promoted by Gordon Brown on whose team he was. His election has similarities with the election of Joseph Muscat to the Labour leadership.

Ed Miliband also used the term “social conservatives” in his attempt to define what he believed in. He had to cling to New Labour without losing the support of Old Labour that had just given him the edge over his brother David in the leadership contest. So while he showed his readiness to embark on a new route by stating that he would make Labour the party of enterprise and the party of small business, and praising New Labour for being enthusiastic about globalisation, the movement of goods and services, the chance to travel and the creation of new markets, he also had to add that Britain had been too exposed to financial services as an economy so when the crash came, it suffered. This too has some bearing on the performance of our economy at present.

The new leader also showed some courage in addressing that perennial

double-edged ally of Labour – the unions. In the past, as we are all too aware in Malta, the unions were the militant arm of Labour when the party was in Opposition. It could well be claimed that Labour was

hardly ever really out of power, for when formally deprived of it in free and fair elections, it still had the might to bring down governments through union action; and it did in the UK, until it ran headlong into an iron lady.

So Ed’s challenge to the unions – that he would have no truck with overblown rhetoric about waves of irresponsible strikes, since the public would not support them and neither should the conference’s delegates – can’t have gone down well.

In fact, one union official, seen on film as muttering something on hearing these words, was revealed through lip-reading to have uttered the word “rubbish”. Irresponsible strikes, declared the new leader, simply added to the book of historic union failures. Again, such statements will be readily understood locally.

“I will make Labour the party of enterprise and also the party of small business” declared Ed Miliband. This too seems to reflect local Labour thinking and it comes as no surprise of course, since in the EU parties of the same persuasion network extensively and tend to adopt very similar policies in different environments.

But it is a huge departure from the ideology of Old Labour and its vision of state control. Social democrats everywhere have discovered that their economic tools never really worked except in good times when they had money to create a benefits society. That too was referred to by Miliband who, like most politicians already in office, has little choice but to get as many people out to work as possible. In the UK that won’t be easy, due to generations of people who have been brought up believing in a nanny state that ensured their livelihood whether they deserved it or not.

Nevertheless, all this is rather promising. Who can quarrel with Ed’s ambition to strengthen families? Who can disagree with his intention to see that the lowest wage is one that allows people to live at some distance from a hand-to-mouth existence? Who can quarrel with his desire to provide high quality apprenticeships? We stopped doing that at the Dockyard and paid the price for it. Who cannot approve of family-friendly employment so that parents can have some time with their children while still honouring their work commitments? Who can not applaud the dream of green spaces (soon to be just a memory in Malta) and the ability of those in office to administer with compassion if not love?

But if he doesn’t already know it, Ed will soon find out that governments are obliged to accept powerful constraints on their actions from corporate and global market forces as well as from the deadweight resistance of the governmental system to anything they may wish to do. The forces of opposition they encounter, often represented by pervasive corporate lobbying and a thousand arguments from civil servants – where an independent civil service still exists – saying why something cannot be done, are largely invisible to the larger public. Governments often find that they have to work out compromises, often undermining and weakening what they set out to achieve while they were in opposition, for in office the influence of their allies and backers and supporters will increase exponentially.  

It is of course no reason for lack of good governance, for corruption, for the absence of clear plans that, for the good of the country, should look further than the five years in office. Can what Ed Miliband called X-factor politics work anymore in this changed world we operate in? Ed was more than right to state that responsibility in any country shouldn’t just be about what you can get away with.

Politics is about leadership or it is about nothing. Many are the respected commentators who have pointed out that at the moment there are no great world figures around.  What there are, as Ed put it, are mostly politicians and politics that have forfeited the trust of the people. What there is around, are systems and institutions that have lost their reputation.

What is needed is more than something new. What is needed is governments that listen with sympathy and understanding and that reflect and think about the state of the people in whose name leadership is being exercised. What is needed, as has been pointed out both locally and abroad, are economic systems that are based on the citizen. Leadership is about more than winning elections. It is about reading the future and bringing in a brand of politics that will encourage the citizen to work and grow as he operates in the honest shadow of administrators he knows he can trust. It is about leaving our children a better country than the one we found. It really is a case of all for one and one for all. Or as near to that ideal as we can

practically get.