No one ever said that being Leader of the Opposition would be easy, and as Greg Rosen says in his chapter of How to be in Opposition: Life in the Political Shadows, edited by Nigel Fletcher, ‘Ed Miliband has his work cut out’.
The run up to the May 5th referendum on AV provides commentators with ample opportunity to analyze the nature of this ‘work’, as we see a political party trying to strike the balance between what comes naturally to an opposition (presenting a tribal and automatic rejection of the government of the day’s position) and the need to tread carefully and cross party lines in order to ensure a favourable outcome in the long run. In such a scenario, how do you weaken your political adversary without dampening your own chances of success? How do you balance opposition and collaboration?
Ed Miliband’s chosen strategy has been to share a ‘Yes to AV’ platform with Lib Dem Business Secretary Vince Cable whilst simultaneously maintaining his derision of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg (refusing to share the platform with him out of fear of being dragged down by Clegg’s apparent unpopularity), all the while urging voters not to use the May 5th referendum to give Clegg a ‘kicking’ as, nice as that would be for the Labour camp, it won’t bring them any closer to AV. Faced with being the opposition to a coalition government, one half of which is ideologically sympathetic to your own party, has forced Labour to come up with new attack strategies and for analysis of these, and for an in-depth look at the nature of political opposition as a whole, Nigel Fletcher’s How to be in Opposition is undoubtedly the go-to title.
Neil Stewart, writing in Progress Online, couldn’t agree more. For Stewart, this title, which is an ‘excellent study of the central importance, but the often humiliating practicalities, of opposition’, is not only ‘compulsory reading for Miliband’s office’ but also for those ‘monarchs and autocrats of north Africa and the Middle East’ who have diligently spent decades carefully crushing any opposition to their power. But now, Stewart suggests, as their regimes crumble around their ears, perhaps they’re wishing they’d read Fletcher’s ‘timely study’ of opposition for, ‘had they done so they might not be facing the collapse of their political houses of cards for the want of an official opposition to funnel the demand for change’.
But whether you are an autocratic dictator, a member of Miliband’s office, or simply an interested observer of Westminster goings-on, How to be in Opposition: Life in the Political Shadows is available here, priced £14.99