What won’t be in Ed Miliband’s speech

The dog that did not bark in the nighttime was a key clue in the Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze – and in penning those lines of dialogue, Arthur Conan Doyle ended up giving the English language a much used turn of phrase to describe the significance of things that don’t happen. Because they don’t happen, it is often easy to miss their significance – and Ed Miliband’s forthcoming speech to Labour conference is likely to prove that.

For here is a confident prediction about what it won’t contain: there will be no announcement that Labour is putting down a no-confidence motion in the government and calling on the Liberal Democrats to vote Cameron out of Number 10 before October is out.

Consider the world through Labour eyes: day after day they tell us how awful the Tories are and how decent Liberal Democrats should really see themselves as colleagues of the Labour movement. Moreover there is no Conservative majority in Parliament.

And yet… despite votes of no confidence having been the means for bringing down governments without a majority in the past, and even often used in the face of a clear one-party majority, the idea that Parliament might be about to vote Cameron out and force the creation of a new government is not on anyone’s list of predictions.

The reason for its absence tells us something about British politics in general and something about Labour in particular. For British politics the lesson is a simple one: decades of talk about how hung Parliaments bring instability have turned to dust very quickly. The widespread expectation is that a coalition can instead last a full five years, with the brief fuss over some of Tim Farron’s loose language during the Liberal Democrat conference being a matter of a few months here or there, not the basic idea of a multi-year coalition.

As for Labour, despite the vehemence of much of the party’s rhetoric about the government, it is not champing at the bit to get back into power before Christmas. That shows a shrewd understanding of the party’s current state and the lessons of history, for working out what the party is for, which policies from the last government to keep and which to ditch, and how to present their leader as a plausible Prime Minister, are all tasks which usually take years to get right.

But even so, if you had asked before the general election whether, in the face of a hung Parliament and a government it deeply dislikes, the Labour Party would not have really been bothered about voting the government out of office, how many people would have said yes?