Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Ed Miliband avoids a showy showdown with the unions

When Ed Miliband peaks, he really knows how to do it. His speech at last autumn’s Labour conference was magnificent. Given the pressure on him to convince the unions to back his reforms to their links to the Labour party, you’d expect he’d have picked today’s address to the Trades Union Congress conference to deliver another blinder. Sadly today was not a peak in the range of Miliband speeches.

Sure, he produced a vaguely funny joke about a chap called ‘Red Ed’ who was in fact the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Stanley. Miliband told the conference that Stanley was ‘the man who first legislated to allow trade unions in this country’. But it felt as though he was scaling a hill as he told this story without ever managing to reach the top. The conference listened, and chuckled and clapped at his joke. But its reception was more like the applause that accompanies a bad father of the bride speech at a wedding.

The clever section of his speech was the way he pitted himself against the Tories to paint himself as the friend of the unions. He contrasted Stanley’s reforms with the way David Cameron ‘oozes contempt for trade unionists from every pore of his being’. ‘How dare he? How dare he insult people – members of trade unions – as he does?’ Then he turned back to himself:

‘Unlike Mr Cameron, I am a One Nation politician. And One Nation is about governing for the whole country. To do this we are going to have to build a new kind of Labour party.’

The subtext was: I’m your mate, unlike Cameron, so trust me and back my reforms.

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