Ed Miliband's Conference Speech

Not one but *two* five-year plans? Ambitious targets? An 80 minute monologue with anecdotes about meeting ordinary people? Forget Red Ed. Today we saw the debut of Kim Jong-Mil. Yeah, yeah, lame. But Ed Miliband's speech was interesting, and not because for what went unsaid. The mild social democracy was there - the 25p/hour minimum wage uprating until 2020; jobless, housing, first time buyer, apprenticeship targets, votes for 16 and 17 year olds and the property speculation mansion tax to raise £1.2bn for thousands more GPs, nurses and careworkers. And, by the standards of British politics, a radical plan to completely decarbonise the economy by 2030. Good stuff. After the austere miserablism of yesterday's Ed Balls speech, it fell to the leader to set out the nicer things. As it should be.

Labour should go much further and offer more. Even within the limits the leadership have set themselves, there is considerable scope for delivering a stronger programme of social democracy and remaining fiscally neutral. Still, as it stands the policy agenda we've got is much better than the electoral anaemia served up by the 2010 manifesto. It's a definite improvement on the social neoliberalism of the Blair/Brown years. That doesn't mean some progressive policies aren't half-arsed. There are a clutch of proposals directly against the interests of our class and movement too. According to Westminster received wisdom, the bitter mix of the okay and the awful is the cocktail swing voters in marginal constituencies enjoy sipping, apparently. Still, on the two crucial measures - the greatest gain for the greatest number; whether more opportunities for further socialist advance will be opened up - on both counts Labour policies have a clear edge over the Tories' demented little Englandism.

To use the abysmal term Ed's speech was no "game-changer". Life under Labour will be less worse. It's an improvement but, good grief, we can aspire to be better than this.