Miliband finds his niche

I spent this morning with Ed Miliband on a trip to a factory in Sunderland. Miliband was visiting the Liebherr plant there, which manufactures cranes.

The centerpiece of the visit was a Q&A with the workforce. Now, a factory in the North East is not the toughest venue for a Labour leader to play. But Miliband appeared far more comfortable in this setting than he does when giving a traditional speech from behind a podium.  

Unlike Miliband’s Q&A at Labour conference, the questions were not softballs or traditional left-wing fare. One set of three questions were: why don’t we close the borders, bring back national service and do more to clamp down on benefit cheats.

Miliband was happy to point to a few areas where he accepted Labour went wrong in government. He conceded that ‘we thought for too long we have financial services that’ll produce lots of good jobs and the rest will be low skilled, low paid. That’s not good enough.’ And added ‘Labour bought into the myth for too long. For too long we accepted that manufacturing was in decline.’

Given the news today about youth unemployment hitting a million, Miliband was on the attack on the coalition’s economic record. He called today ‘a terrible day for Britain’ and said that the coalition ‘used to blame the last Labour government, now they blame the Eurozone’.

One moment where one sensed that the audience agreed with Miliband was when he said that he wanted a workers’ representative on every remuneration committee. He argued that ‘if you can’t look the ordinary worker on the shop floor in the eye and say this salary is justified because of the wealth you create for this company, then you shouldn’t do it.’ Where Miliband was less comfortable was on discussing benefit fraud, something that clearly exercised an awful lot of the people in the room.

Overall, these sessions showcase a side of Miliband that doesn’t come through — or cut through — from Westminster politics. He’s been doing around two of these tours a week since party conference. It’ll be interesting to see how much they change his language and overall performance.