Miliband's speech fails to excite

Was Ed’s Big Speech worth the extended wait? Not really. It wasn’t a stone-cold terrible speech, but neither was it the rambunctious, attention-grabbing number that his leadership could do with. In fact, we could have saved ourselves the effort by simply reading his New Year’s message again. That was considerably shorter, and covered almost all of the same ground. Squeezed middle? Check. Tackling vested interests? Check. An admission that Labour will need to cut? Ch… oh, you get the point.

The best that could be said about today’s speech is that it presented some of these arguments more clearly than in the past. Indeed, the attack on George Osborne’s fiscal agenda was, by Miliband’s usual standards, particularly punchy. And it teed up the Labour leader for what was perhaps his strongest point: that, contra what the coalition have previously suggested, the next government will inherit a deficit. ‘Whoever governs after 2015,’ he stressed, ‘will have to find more savings.’