Ed Miliband: Voice of a New Generation?

I was playing golf this afternoon and so didn’t watch Milifest live. But having watched Ed Miliband’s speech and, more importantly, having read it one thing is clear: there was a good speech in there. Unfortunately it was the speech Miliband gave defending the record of the first two Blair ministries. That part of his address had a coherence to it that was absent once he started to talk about the here and now and, even more problematically, the future.

Indeed, defending the first two parliaments of New Labour only served to remind one how pointless the third was and how little thought  – in part because there hasn’t been enough time for said thought – has gone into retooling Labour for opposition. All this talk of “change” seems a little irrelevent just120 days after the country has decided to change* government itself. (This is why it would have been wiser, in my view, for Labour to wait 18 months before deciding upon their new, long-term leader.