Miliband comes out swinging

After being mostly absent in an embarrassing week, which culminates in today’s Sun headline of ‘Block Ed’ referring to the Labour leader’s Twitter gaffe yesterday, Ed Miliband has emerged with a self-assured interview in the Guardian. In parts, he is even boastful. Miliband declares himself ‘someone of real steel and grit’ and brags ‘I am the guy who took on Murdoch… I am the guy that said the rules of capitalism as played in the last 30 years have got to change’.

He claims – contrary to Maurice Glasman’s criticism this week – to have ‘a very clear plan’ about what needs to change in Britain. And what is it exactly? Ed says it hinges on ‘responsible capitalism’, which incorporates his big themes of ‘the squeezed middle, young people and the next generation, responsibility at the top and at the bottom’. And here he thinks he has the edge on the Prime Minister:

‘Does anyone really believe David Cameron came into politics to create a more responsible capitalism? The public are not going to buy it…  It is totally implausible for Cameron to be the architect of responsible capitalism. Doubtless his focus groups are telling him the issue is a big deal, but that is it.’

And he even borrows a phrase Nick Clegg to describe his goal. It is, he says, to ‘hardwire fairness into the economy’, which is exactly how the Lib Dem leader described his party’s 2010 manifesto. It’s not the first time Miliband’s used one of Clegg’s lines, having copied a whole section of Clegg’s 2008 conference speech in his own conference speech in Liverpool a few months ago. Maybe we’ll soon see him wearing one of those ‘I agree with Nick’ t-shirts.

In the rest of the interview, Miliband manages to incorporate most of the key points in the Tom Baldwin memo that was leaked on Thursday. He claims Labour have recovered well from their ‘second worst result since universal suffrage in 2010’; he hits the government on the cost of living, particularly energy prices and rail fares; and he says he and Ed Balls have ‘already said we need new fiscal rules’, but says there’s no need to say what they’ll be yet:

‘I don’t think David Cameron and George Osborne set out their fiscal rules until a few months before the election. I just don’t agree there is a vacuum.’

But he does apparently feel the need to exaggerate in defence of Ed Balls’ fiscal credibility, claiming that ‘Ed is the guy that invented the spending freeze 1997-98’. Presumably he means ‘Ed is the guy that suggested sticking to the Conservatives’ planned spending freeze 1997-98′.