Ed Miliband’s Tartan Roots

At some point it seems wise to suppose that Ed Miliband isn’t playing any devious or subtle long game and that, far from being baffling, his public pronouncements are probably a pretty reasonable guide to what he actually, truly believes. And he really doesn’t think that Labour made any significant errors while in office. Surpluses are for wimps; real men run deficits even in boom times. In this, as in so much else, Miliband rejects Tony Blair’s analysis and sides with his old mentor Gordon Brown. Fair enough.

Iain Martin finds this perplexing, not least from any electoral/political perspective and he’s right. Miliband’s views are touchingly old-fashioned. So much so, in fact, that perhaps he’s in the wrong parliament. He’d be quite at home at Holyrood. This is something David Aaronovitch mentioned on Twitter yesterday and the more I think about it the more I suspect he’s on to something: if Ed Miliband had his druthers, English politics would look a lot more like Scottish politics than it does now.