Time & Perspective Quote by Ed Miliband

Progress, in Miliband's telling, isn’t the reward for competence; it’s the prize for heresy. By framing New Labour’s “most important lesson” as a habit of “challenging the conventional wisdom,” he’s doing more than praising Blair-era modernisation. He’s trying to launder a controversial political brand into a usable method: don’t copy the past, copy the audacity.

The intent is tactical. Miliband led Labour after its 2010 defeat, when the party was trapped between nostalgia and self-flagellation: too pro-market for the left, too statist for swing voters, too haunted by Iraq and the financial crash to claim “third way” confidence. This line offers an escape hatch. It invites Labour members to stop litigating New Labour as a moral identity and start treating it as a strategic posture: win by unsettling assumptions, not by embalming them.

The subtext is an argument about power inside the party. “Conventional wisdom” can mean the Westminster commentariat, the Treasury’s orthodoxies, business-as-usual triangulation, even Labour’s own internal catechisms. Miliband positions himself as the rightful heir to New Labour’s disruptive energy while quietly disowning its most damaging certainties: that markets self-correct, that inequality is politically tolerable, that globalisation needs only cheerleading.

It works because it’s a flattering provocation. To supporters, it implies Labour’s best moments come when it stops seeking permission. To critics, it reframes New Labour not as a settled verdict but as an unfinished experiment - one that can be continued, corrected, and claimed without apology.