Ed Miliband’s speech on reducing the deficit has attracted a fair bit of criticism for not telling us very much that’s new. It was supposed to be a Big Speech, and Big Speech normally means Big Announcement, but there wasn’t one.
There wasn’t even really any bigger attempt to tell us what Labour would do after the General Election. The Labour leader spent a fair chunk of the question-and-answer session afterwards telling the audience that he had been ‘clear’, which is what politicians end up having to say when they haven’t been clear, often deliberately.
But it’s unfair to say that this was a useless speech as it did articulate better than previously the Labour leader’s basic vision for the economy. It started with Miliband saying ‘my speech today is about the deficit’, just so it was clear that he wasn’t going to forget it this time around.
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