Belated shadow cabinet and front bench appointments comment

So, this was originally meant to be entered to Leeds Student for the 15/10/10 issue, but the repsonse to the Browne Report rightly took precedence.

Since the announcement of his victory in the Labour leadership contest, Ed Miliband has been under scrutiny from analysts and bloggers of all political colours who are trying to discern the direction in which he will lead Labour. It has been two weeks since the results of the shadow cabinet and front bench appointments have been revealed, and instead of confirming expectations, he bucked them and further confounded commentators. While his choices were unexpected, he must take care to ensure he is still making wise ones- and there are certainly a few that raised some eyebrows in and outside of Westminster.
Foremost, of course, was the decision to appoint Alan Johnson as shadow chancellor, denying the position to frontrunners Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper. Miliband confidently and knowingly prevented either one of Labour’s prominent economic experts from being the one to spearhead their response to the coalition deficit reduction plans. Alan Johnson’s appointment is likely to pacify those who feared the “lurch to the left” in the wake of Ed Miliband’s leadership victory aided by the trade union vote- those who, like Johnson himself, backed the leadership campaign of David Miliband. His position regarding deficit reduction is nearer to that of former Chancellor Alistair Darling’s- the pledge to half the budget deficit within four years- and it will appeal to those within the party who were more reluctant to strike down the spectre of New Labour that has dogged the party in the wake of their election defeat. He has already proved a strong counter to Osborne in the Commons, but the government’s rebuke- citing inexperience and “deficit denial”- is clear and damning.
Despite his comparative economic failings, Johnson may well be a more strategic choice than Balls. Ed Miliband will seek to avoid the kind of personality clashes that appear to have rocked the Blair-Brown relationship- elder brother David’s refusal to serve in the shadow cabinet might too be seen in this light- while exercising more of his own economic expertise over Johnson. Elsewhere, some of his chief allies within the party were appointed to key posts, with campaign manager Sadiq Khan becoming shadow justice secretary, while erstwhile lefty and unsuccessful leadership candidate Diane Abbott became shadow minister for Public Health. Conciliatory measures such as these showed an opposition leader intuitively taking control of his party, disregarding outside anticipations. Unfortunately, and confusingly, this intuition did not extend to all reaches of his party appointments.
Phil Woolas, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, was among those appointed to Ed Balls’ team of junior Home Office ministers. During the general election campaign Woolas and his team published a leaflet defending his “strong” stance on immigration, while apparently attacking Lib Dem candidate Elwyn Watkins on his party’s plans for an amnesty for certain immigrants who had come to Britain illegally. “The Lib Dems plan to give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay [in Britain]...Do you want the extremists to win?”, read one line on the leaflet, accompanied by inflammatory pictures of radical Islamist demonstrators brandishing signs with slogans such as “Behead those who insult Islam”. In the wake of other campaign material that featured doctored photos of the Lib Dem candidate being arrested, and false claims that he possessed a criminal record, Watkins issued a legal challenge to Woolas and his subsequent election victory.
Not only were the tactics of Woolas’s team churlish and petty, they were frankly offensive, and clearly designed to play on the fears of what prosecutor Helen Mountfield described as “the white Sun [reading] vote”. E-mails between election agent Joseph Fitzpatrick and Woolas speak of “[getting] the white vote angry” and going strong on the “militant Moslem [sic] angle”. Telling untruths about a candidate’s personal life or political manifesto is bad practice enough, but deliberately invoking racial tensions in the community in an effort to revitalise a flagging campaign is downright despicable; it is something for which the BNP were overwhelmingly rejected by the voting public this May.
If Woolas is defeated in court, he will be expelled from parliament and a by-election called. It would be the first major scandal to hit the opposition, and would surely bring Ed Miliband’s judgement into question. Left-wing bloggers have hit the roof over the selection of Woolas. His shadow cabinet decisions already made the headlines for their unexpected nature. If any one of his choices proves disastrous during Labour’s opposition, there will be no one else to blame.