Ed Miliband: the stone ‘got people talking’ — and refuses to apologise for borrowing too much (again)

Ed Miliband began the first 15 minutes of his NHS day talking about trust and the deficit. In a feisty interview on the Today programme, the Labour leader again did not apologise for borrowing too much when his party was in government. Instead, he argued it was a failure of banking regulation that lead to Britain’s financial problems:

‘Yesterday George Osborne’s permanent secretary at the Treasury Nicholas Macpherson published an article, in which he said that 2008 was a banking crisis pure and simple. And he reflected my judgment which is what happened in the country is that we had a dramatic crisis in banks which lead to high deficit.’

When he was pushed again by Humphrys, Miliband said ‘I’m proud we invested in hospitals – the financial crisis drove the deficit upwards.’ He did not give an answer to the question of when Labour might abolish the deficit, and instead stuck to the line in Labour’s manifesto that he would reduce it every year. As