Let Us Take Ed Miliband Seriously

Perhaps it was a little harsh to compare Ed Miliband to Harold Camping, the millennarian who said the world was going to end yesterday.

After all, lots of people had already accused him of making a fool of himself by calling for Ken Clarke’s resignation (including Suzanne Moore, Steve Richards, Mary Dejevsky and Christina Patterson).

Why could I not pay attention to the substance of an important speech he made to Progress yesterday, some of my readers have complained? It was trailed in advance, so I did pay attention to it here, suggesting that the Labour leader had got his history wrong.

But what about the rest of it?

Instead of comparing Miliband to a doomsday cultist I could have taken his cliché-ridden verbiage seriously.

Labour needs to “own the future”, apparently.

All David Cameron offers is “a shrivelled, pessimistic, austere view of the future”. Ed Miliband, on the other hand, has this compilation of the Banned List’s greatest hits:

In the future the Labour offer to aspirational voters must be that we will address the new inequality by hard wiring fairness into the economy.

He wants to deliver “better, optimistic politics”.

Give me strength.

He’ll be making another important speech tomorrow. You will understand if I refrain from further comment until about 2014.

Photograph: Rex Features

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