Miliband aide: Labour has never addressed the way the economy works

What’s Ed Miliband’s vision for the economy? We’ll get the public version of that vision in a short while when Ed Balls gives his speech to the Labour conference, but last night one of Ed Miliband’s closest advisers gave us a more interesting glimpse of the underpinning of the Labour leader’s economic plan. Stewart Wood, a former aide to Gordon Brown and now a key member of Miliband’s team, gave a fringe interview to ResPublica’s Philip Blond. The two men nattered with glasses of wine in their hands (which were at one point topped up by a CCHQ suffer embedded behind enemy lines) about Wood’s values. One answer in particular, on how Labour should approach the economy from now on, was very interesting:

‘Tax and spend will continue to be a core part of what we do, but there are two limits. One is a constraint by the public finances and the economic reality where we just don’t have, you can’t put pressure on the tax and spend mechanisms we used, that some people are advocating.