Comment: Johnson resignation is a good day for Labour
Alan Johnson’s departure will prompt ugly headlines. But this will be remembered as a good day for Labour.
By < ahref=”http://twitter.com/iandunt”>Ian Dunt
Alan Johnson has resigned. In the short term, Ed Balls will be attacked by the government and the media. But in the long term, it will help his party turn opposition to cuts into electoral success.
Balls was always the most capable economist on the Labour team. During the leadership campaign, his keynote speech was the first to make a genuinely convincing alternative case for cuts. But he was tainted by his association with Gordon Brown, his mentor. And Miliband had to prove that he could juggle the opposing camps inside Labour, of which the Balls/Cooper grouping was potentially the most threatening.
Johnson’s appointment, meanwhile, solved many problems at once. He was a centrist, which helped tackle the Red Ed label. He was a Blairite, which relieved the New Labour wing of the party. He was the main cheerleader of David Miliband, whose loss in the Labour leadership race threatened to split the party along fraternal lines.
The only problem, of course, was that Johnson couldn’t do economics. He tried to utilise that ‘cockney postman’ charm of his in an early admission that he required an economics primer. But like Liam Byrne’s joke note, it backfired. The one-liner was incessantly used against him.
His first press conference ended with a vanishing act, as he scarpered from the room to evade questions. His response to the spending review, a triumph of rhetoric and Commons jokes over actual scrutiny, was laughably well received by Labour, which evidently thought a bit of parliamentary theatre was enough to fulfil its role as opposition. Then he made matters worse by struggling to remember the current rate of employers’ national insurance in a live television interview.
All the while, Johnson couldn’t maintain the party line on graduate tax or a permanent 50p rate of income tax. Photos of him being wined and dined by lobbyists also inflicted damage.
In the short term, it will be tough. Balls will be attacked for being the son of Brown, for being on the left, for being a deficit denier. He will be heralded as proof that Labour has not changed. And that’s if Johnson’s personal reasons explanation holds up. If it doesn’t, and it emerges that Miliband pushed him out, the Labour leader’s judgment will be questioned. After all, who chooses a shadow chancellor and then gets rid of him four months later?
But in the long term, today was a good day for Labour. Balls is profoundly competent with his new brief. He is widely regarded as the scariest shadow you could imagine. Tomorrow the Tory party will put out its response, writing off the new opponent as Old Labour incompetence. But tonight, at home, Osborne will be fearful.
Balls has a coherent opposition to cuts which is not selective or political, but intellectual. His opposition will look principled and not opportunistic, as it does at present. He argued against his own party on its position on the deficit.
This will also be a good day for the country, no matter what your views of the need to cut the deficit. This is a tumultuous period of massive political and economic change. Britain deserves a thorough, coherent, robust opposition, especially under a coalition government, especially under such severe economic cuts.
It just got one.
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