If you didn’t like New Labour much, then you have something in common with Ed Miliband — who appears to have loathed it. He’s just given his first speech of the year to the Fabian Society, the torch-bearers of an older type of socialism, and his audience was left in no doubt that if elected, he would offer a very different type of left-wing politics to that he helped served up when working for the Blair/Brown governments.
Miliband has hammered nails into the coffin of New Labour before, notably in a speech in September 2010 just days after he was elected Labour leader. Today, he wanted to make sure the coffin was hermetically sealed. Take what he said on the economy:
‘It begins from the truth that New Labour did not do enough to take on the vested interests and bring about structural change in our economy.
‘Now, New Labour did challenge the old trickle-down economics by redistributing from the top. But
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