Ed Miliband is in a bind. He really should be concentrating on the competence argument,
but keeps falling back on the ‘evil Tory ideologue’ argument.
There are several reasons for this. The first is his determination to distance himself from the Blair-Brown era. This makes it difficult to provide a convincing critique of policies which appear New Labour-ish: everything from Free Schools to health service reform and the Work Programme. The second is that many of the statistics available still date from the Labour years and so evidence of the effects of Coalition policies are simply not there. The third, and most serious, is that Miliband has yet to convince that he would be a more competent and reassuring presence at the helm. This was shown most obviously when Yvette Cooper made such a convincing job of skewering Theresa May over the relaxation of passport checks shortly after the Labour leader had failed to do so at PMQs.
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