Labour have made a bad joke worse

I've been watching Ed Milliband with increasing incredulity.

He and his brother look like the saddest two boys at the 6th form disco. And they look like they're still not old enough to have left it. Certainly Ed's arguments are straight from the school debating society's handbook.

Saying that he represents a 'new generation' is beyond a joke. Doesn't he understand that being younger in years - or less mature, one might say - doesn't qualify anyone as representing a generational shift? If anything Ed Milliband is going back to the past; his links with the trade unions, who handed him the leadership, will come to embarrass him more and more as industrial conflict looms. In his acceptance speech he slapped them down; well he had to really, because he knows the public won't support 70s-style strikes.

Unlike some people, I'm not so bothered about his knifing of his brother. He's a politician, what does anyone expect? But his cynical revelation that he belives that the Iraq war was a 'mistake' is pretty grubby. If that's what he thought why hasn't he been saying that for years? Like most of Labour, he followed Blair because he trusted him; then waited to see how the war worked out and what the public mood was; then seeing that things weren't going well he came out and positioned himself loudly as an anti-Iraq champion. At least D. Milliband stuck to what he believed, right or wrong.

On the only issue of the moment, the deficit and the cuts, he's not so sure. What does he stand for? What does Labour stand for? New Labour is dead, Caesar Blair has been stabbed and his heir Brown exiled and locked away out of sight like a mad old aunt that they're all embarrassed about. Ed doesn't have any policy detail on spending cuts because he and Labour don't stand for anything any more. Kind of like John Major, or his Tory successors. Diane Abbott would have been a suicidal choice of leader, but at least everyone knows where you stand with her.

The only thing Ed seems to focussed on is going after the highly paid. The Laffer curve, which says that raising taxes reduces the tax rate, and a theory that has such wide support amongst both right and left, has been ignored. (To be fair, the Coalition has done much the same.) All the talk is about 'fairness' now, which is understandable. So rich folk are an easy target for Ed. The other thing Ed has said is try to stamp his adolescent mark on politics by rubbishing the way New Labour did....everything. From the Post Office to Iraq, from their economic policy to banking, from tax policy to education policy, from anti-terror legislation to the 'nanny state', Ed carried out a bonfire of New Labour. But defining yourself by what you don't  believe isn't enough.

Time will tell. Ed has shifted to the left without defining what it is he believes in. Blair (and Cameron) knew that to be in Government you have to capture, and hold, the middle ground. Labour is unlikely to, and has a leader that will now be reduced to sniping and carping on the sidelines. The Lib Dem involvement in government condemns Labour to a lonely existence on the left. That was Cameron's masterstroke. He 'decontaminated' the Tory brand with a dose of vitamin Clegg, and Labour are left like a soggy old pudding, so bereft of talent and ideas that they will probably spend a decade in opposition. Even if the Coalition screws it all up - and they might -  Labour will take a long time to decontaminate themselves in people's memories from the deficit they left us with.