Ed wants to tear it all up

Ed Miliband’s pre-conference interviews in Progress and the New Statesman serve as a reminder of the Labour leader’s desire to move the political centre ground.

To the New Statesman he talks repeatedly of changing the current ‘settlement’ both economic and political. I presume by that he means the orthodoxies of the Thatcher-Blair era. Indeed, he tells Progress of one area where he wants to do things differently:

‘…people used to say “it is anti-aspiration to talk about people at the top”, it is not anti-aspiration – it is pro-aspiration. It is pro-aspiration because if you have got banks who are not doing the right thing, if you’ve got people in banks taking tens of millions in bonuses that aren’t deserved, if they are hurting small businesses, then it is pro-aspiration to be pointing that out and promising to change it.’