Ed Miliband is better placed than the Tories to follow Roosevelt

On Friday, Ed Miliband pledged to introduce greater competition in our banking market. Last September, he pledged to freeze energy prices for 20 months while our broken energy market is reset to expand competition and consumer choice.

Reforming broken markets to increase competition and address the long-term sources of our cost-of-living crisis might seem an unusual theme for Labour to champion. In fact it is an approach that has learnt from a progressive conservative tradition, one that understands the importance of reform to ensure that markets remain open and competitive.

Noone understood this idea better than the American President Theodore Roosevelt – a passionate believer in free enterprise, and a tenacious advocate of market reform.

Roosevelt became the 26th President of the United States in 1901, when William McKinley was assassinated just under a year after taking office for his second term. It was a period of Republican ascendancy in America: for 24 of the previous 32 years a Republican had occupied the White House.