If Ed Miliband is the Answer, What is the Question?

Election post-mortems are always interesting and often fun. Take the speech Ed Miliband made to launch his campaign for the Labour leadership. While paying due attention* to Labour’s achievements in government, it still reads as an indictment of the party’s record in office. Consider these snippets:

We must start by understanding the country we seek to lead again.

…[T]he truth is that as government wore on we lost that sense of progressive mission and of being in touch with people’s concerns.

As time wore on we came to seem more caretakers than idealists—more technocratic than transformative.

And when political parties lose that sense of idealism and mission they become much more vulnerable to the currents of events.

For us, increasingly, because we lost that sense of progressive mission, we found ourselves beached, unable to speak to too many of the concerns of the people of our country.

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…[T]he truth is that over time the connection between our sense and the people’s sense of fairness frayed and we need to acknowledge that.