Ed Milliband's real speech at the TUC march

Comrades -
It is truly an honour and a privilege to be standing here in front of you all. A privilege for you, that is. For I won't actually be joining in your march. That would be too embarrassing for me.

Yet it's good to be amongst friends. My own MPs didn't actually elect me, you see, but you - the trade unions - put me where I am today. So I know who my real friends are! I owe you, and we both know it. So this is how I'm going to pay you back: with words, platitudes, and the total absence of alternative spending plans. But I know you will forgive me!


So comrades we all know what we are against - because it's easy to be against things. We are against these savage Tory cuts! Now I know that Alistair Darling, and the Labour party, said that we would make £52 billion pounds of cuts - we said so very publicly in the election campaign. But with your help, we can persuade the public to forget that. Yes brothers, we must forget, and so must they. So I stand with you in opposing each and every single cut this Coalition government is making, but like you I will never ever spell out exactly how the public sector will be reduced. And with your help I won't mention public sector pensions. Ok maybe I did just there, but that's the only time!

I stand with you nurses who are marching against these cuts. So what if the Tories ring-fenced health spending and we didn't? So what that if we'd won the  election the NHS would be suffering a more severe spending squeeze than it currently is? I want it both ways and will criticise them anyway. But that doesn't matter. And I know you'd never embarrass me by bringing this up!

I stand with you teachers, firefighters and council workers. I won't tell you which cuts I would have made had I become Prime Minister, or how my cuts would have affected you, or how many of you I would have sacked. Now is not the time for that.

The Tories say that there is no alternative. But I tell you this: there IS an alternative, and that is to implement cuts that are almost as big, but at a slightly slower pace whilst increasing taxes a little more than the Coalition. No-one knows whether our plan or the Coalition's plan is the best course, because economists are divided and the lessons of history are not clear-cut. If you'll pardon the pun! I know you will. Being in opposition allows me and my friends to protest about every action the Coalition makes without spelling out the alternative or saying what we would have done. Such is the exorbitant privilege of opposition! You guys know a thing or two about that, so that makes me feel special.

But look at the team I have assembled around me. Alistair Darling made some mistakes but he was quite a capable chap, who made the right calls when the banks collapsed. So of course I got rid of him. I brought in someone, Alan Johnson, whose experience as a postman and union man was just what Britain needed. When he left I brought in Ed Balls. I brought him on board not because I was desperate but because I needed fresh ideas. And who better to bring fresh thinking that the man who was part and parcel of Gordon Brown's brilliant stewardship of the economy, and who bears the stamp of all the policies that he enacted?

Comrades I know this is not a time for clichés, but I feel the hand of history on my shoulder, I really do. You know me as a man of principle. You all know, for instance, how I suddenly discovered that the Iraq war was wrong, just in time for my campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party. But although it was so very wrong to bomb Saddam Hussein, it's now so very right to bomb Colonel Gadaffi. I don't really understand this whole Libya thing, but then neither do you and neither does anyone else in the country. So again I feel at home. You see, we in the Labour Party decided that Colonel Gaddafi was statesmanlike, as my learned colleague Jack Straw once described him, so it would be just plain embarrassing if we didn't follow the government line now. Apparently someone even kissed him in a tent in Libya once, but I can't remember who that was. Better we forget about that too!

Most of you are well-meaning and honest people, worried about the future. I assume you all know that some cuts will have to be made somewhere in the public sector. Where and when and how deep and how fast these cuts will be made is what we need to debate, but we all know that public spending has to be constrained. So those of you who have placards saying 'no cuts' must just be Tory agent provocateurs who have infiltrated this movement to discredit it.

So here we are, standing in Hyde Park in 2011. Today we find common cause with the suffragettes and with Martin Luther King's civil rights movement. People will say that that's a ludicrous comparison because the circumstances and issues are completely different. They are obviously wrong, comrades. Because taking child benefits away from people who already earn shed loads is exactly the same as the colour bar in Alabama! And denying women the vote is exactly the same as denying the navy its Harriers or the middle classes their Sure Start Centres. We are also the same as the anti-Apartheid campaigners in South Africa. That of course makes me Nelson Mandela. Now I'm not old enough to remember what all that was about, but my big brother David is, and he told me that there was lots of racism and stuff over there. So we are marching for that! No hang on a minute…. I mean we are against that! You know what I mean.

So comrades I salute you. You have been a useful bandwagon for me to jump on - on jump on it I have. March the good march, and fight the good fight. Well, not literally. That would make things awkward for me. Think of the TV pictures! We have to squeeze the rich bankers - but not local authority chief executives, and especially not MPs. The Tory millionaires of the Bullingdon club don’t' know anything about how public sector workers have to survive. But I, with my private schooling, Oxbridge education and entire career spent in politics, am completely different. And remember, I'm one of you. You can rest assured, comrades,  that if I ever win power, if I ever step through the polished door of Number 10 Downing Street, that I will drop you all like a hot brick. Thank you.