New party leaders never want for advice. Since his election as leader of the British Labour Party last month, everyone has words of wisdom for Ed Miliband. This frenzied fight to mold the Miliband message is hardly surprising; a series of poor policy and presentational decisions when Labour last lost power in 1979 kept the party out of office for a generation. How Miliband defines himself in the next few weeks will determine whether his party is fated to another long spell in opposition.
The fundamentals faced by Miliband are forbidding. Labour's share of the vote in the May general election was its second lowest since 1918. The party is also financially and intellectually broke. Miliband made a good start in renewing voters trust in Labour in his first speech as leader, denouncing the mistakes of his predecessors; the Iraq war was "wrong," unbridled faith in the market "naive" and the creeping authoritarianism of Britain's counterterrorism "irresponsible."
But to win back support for Labour, Miliband must offer a vision of the future as well a critique of the past. Miliband won the Labour leadership by positioning himself to the left of the front-runner, his own older brother and Blairite heir apparent, David Miliband. His critics on the right of the party suggest that the younger Miliband's left-of-center rhetoric was a calculated ploy to win the leadership — or at least, they hope it was.