We’ve grown so used to regarding Ed and David Miliband as mutual nemeses that it’s strange to see them operating as a tag team today. The younger brother has delivered a fiery attack on the ‘unfairness and economic failure’ of the coalition, while the elder brother has an article in the Mirror arguing that the government is ‘Wrong about how to grow the economy in the modern world’. There’s also another article by the latter in the Times (£), just in case you haven’t had your fill of MiliCommentary.
Much of what they say is unsurprising, but some things do stand out from their twin attacks nonetheless. The first is their insistence that the coalition isn’t just incompetent, but also ‘wrong’. As MiliD puts it himself, ‘The key charge is not that the Government are incompetent. It is that they are wrong.’ This line is also echoed in a mock Coalition Agreement that Labour have released today (Look! It even uses the same green font as the real one!), which stresses that ‘it’s not the Government’s communications strategy that is the problem — it’s their failure.’ What this implies about Labour’s own strategy, I’m not sure, although it does suggest that they’re leaning towards a more moralising, upfront stance, such as that adopted by Francois Hollande in France.
And there are touches of Hollande elsewhere, too. Remember Ed Miliband welcoming the new French President’s election by saying that, ‘This new leadership is sorely needed as Europe seeks to escape from austerity’? Well, today, his brother writes that, ‘The challenge for Mr Hollande is to confront the flawed policy consensus of austerity — but also boldly to embrace reform.’ At the very least, it’s a striking change in tone from earlier this year, when Labour were all about claiming that they’d cut too. As if to underline this, that mock Coalition Agreement unashamedly attacks almost every spending cut there is.
Whether this is the Milibands’ design or not, it does suggest how Labour could get swept up by Hollande’s victory. If the French President succeeds with his agenda, then it might embolden the anti-cuts brigade over here. But if he fails, what then?
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