Those Miliband boys are clever. I was trying to discover what they stood for, and I thought I’d found something interesting in a speech by Ed Miliband. Then I realised I was mistaken.
‘I want a society where there is intergenerational equity,’ he said in a speech to Compass (not the investor and analyst group of that name but the ‘membership organisation promoting left-wing debate in modern Britain’). Perhaps the investment red herring made me think that ‘intergenerational equity’ meant leaving property to one’s children, without having it confiscated by death duties. No such luck.
To Ed’s interlocutors, ‘intergenerational equity’ is to do with ‘sustainable development’, global warming and all that. In other words, not leaving the planet a wreck for our grandchildren, if any. It is heartening in a way, because it militates against the Keynesian notion that ‘in the long-term we’re all dead’.
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