According to a spuriously scientific study, today is the day when festive excess gets the better of us, with one in two Brits opting to stay on the sofa with the curtains closed fretting about bills and weight gain. So how fortunate it is that Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband have chosen to rouse a hungover nation today with their stirring new year messages.
Ed Miliband promises that he will be setting out ‘concrete steps’ on how One Nation Labour will work, citing business, education and welfare as examples. He does add that he doesn’t ‘offer easy answers and I’m not going to offer false promises either’. But it’s difficult to see how the Labour leader can make any promises at all on areas such as welfare without talking about money. And how can he talk about money when Ed Balls has pledged a zero-based spending review which delays the tricky decisions until after 2015? Perhaps the Labour leader’s ‘concrete steps’ are made of a slightly less robust material.
On schools, he can set out a general direction, which will certainly come as a relief to poor old Stephen Twigg, who has spent his front bench career so far avoiding questions on whether or not he really supports the expansion of New Labour education policies.
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