English Labour leaders tend to find Scottish party conferences difficult. The Scots tend to be more old-fashioned, unreconstructed and left-wing than their English colleagues which can make it difficult for English party leaders to gauge the mood when they come north.
But Ed Miliband actually managed to get through his address to the Scottish Labour Party conference without any major problems this afternoon, primarily because he managed to adapt his One Nation slogan to fit the independence debate. Miliband has been banging on about One Nation for two years now with few people having any idea what he means. But when he refers to the independence debate, the concept suddenly has meaning – and this is what he concentrated on today.
‘You cannot be a narrow nationalist and stand for social justice,’ he said.
The idea, both of the UK and of One Nation Labour, was about ‘sharing resources and sharing risks’, the Labour leader said, and ‘on that basis we redistribute’.
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