Miliband is trapped in his own foggy argument

With one well-timed jab in PMQs, David Cameron turned much of this week’s political debate – in domestic terms, at least – into a debate about Ed Miliband’s leadership. And how is Miliband responding? Predictably, for the most part. His celebratory speech in Feltham and Heston this morning reduced down to the claim that the result ‘offers a verdict on the Government’s failed economic plan’. And his interview in today’s FT covers much of the same territory.

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But the FT interview is also revealing in one particular regard: it demonstrates, once again, how Miliband is caught in a strange, undefinable strategy somewhere between attack and defence. This was, if you remember, a feature of his first speech as Labour leader – and here it crops up again. In his rush to criticise the Tories, he lambasts their deficit reductioneering as ‘too far, too fast’. But, in a counter-rush not to sound too left-wing, he also admits that ‘We are not going to have lots of money to spend … It’s not going to be a situation that we saw after the 1997 election where we had big investment in the public realm.’ And he even chucks in the Blarite rallying cry, ‘Efficiency and reform will be essential right across every area.’ These may all be reconcilable positions, but when uttered by Miliband, and coupled with his party’s thin policy offering, they come across as neither here, nor there.

On reading all those snippets, part of me felt slightly sorry for the Labour leader. In a clumsy, accidental sort of way, he is actually highlighting that there isn’t as much fiscal difference between Labour and the Tories as Ed Balls would have you believe: both would restrain their spending, both would cut. But then I noticed him suggesting that Labour would ‘pay down the debt’ – when, actually, by any measure, the Darling Plan proposed nothing of the sort – and the sympathy vanished. Miliband’s is a foggy, nebulous position. Labour MPs might well ask whether it’s going to get them anywhere.