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I was not the only person to be thoroughly unimpressed at Ed Miliband's response to the Budget in the House of Commons the other day - writing in his regular Telegraph blog Dan Hodges comes to a very similar, albeit harsher, conclusion.
By Dan Hodges
Every Budget begins with a prologue. “This is a Budget for jobs”, “this is a Budget for growth”, etc.
This afternoon George Osborne claimed his was a Budget for the “maker, the doer and the saver”. As he said it I half expected the old theme to Record Breakers to strike up in the background.
But the Chancellor was wrong. It was not a Budget for the maker. Or the doer. Or the saver.
It was the Budget that proved conclusively Ed Miliband is not yet ready to be prime minister of this country.
Before I explain why, I need to insert a couple of qualifications. As regular readers may know, I’m not the Labour leader’s biggest fan. I’ve got absolutely nothing against him personally, and on those occasions we’ve bumped into each other he’s been polite and funny and generous with his time. Much more generous than he needs to be, given some of the things I’ve written about him.
But ever since he was elected I’ve been unable to ignore the fact that – to my eyes – he seems utterly out of his depth. His strategic choices are wrong. His leadership posture is wrong. His chosen political narrative is wrong. So when it comes to Miliband, yes, I have form.
The second qualification is that responding to the Budget is far and away the hardest job a leader of the opposition has. You have minimal preparation time. This year that was especially true, given the Budget had been trailed less heavily than any of the last 20 years or so. And it was crafted in such a way that it was either shamelessly populist – new air ambulances and cuts in bingo tax – or relatively opaque, such as the big announcement on pension tax reform. George Osborne did have a rabbit, but like Jimmy Stewart’s, it was an invisible one.
But each of those qualifications not withstanding, Miliband’s Budget speech was one of the most wretched I’ve ever seen from a party leader. In fact, it wasn’t a speech at all. It was a series of Labour Party press releases randomly thrown together without anything even resembling a coherent textual – never mind intellectual – structure.
Miliband talked about the bankers. He talked about the Etonians. He talked about the 2012 top rate tax cut. He talked about the Bedroom Tax. He talked about the taxes George Osborne had levied in previous Budgets. In short he talked about everything but the Budget that had just been unveiled in front of him.
It got so bad that Tory MPs kept shouting the speech was out of order because it bore no relation to the proceedings of the House. And they were right.
Yes, the Budget is very much a piece of political street theatre. Very few people watch it live, and those who see the clips on the news this evening may well think one or two of Miliband’s random sound bites have resonance.
But this stuff matters. It is still the Budget. One of the signature political and economic events of the year. And the leader of the opposition, any leader of the opposition, has an obligation to do better than this.
As it is, we learnt several important things today. The first is that three and a half years into his leadership Miliband still does not have the maturity or flexibility to hold his own when politics get serious.
He’s a pretty decent House of Commons performer. He can be quite impressive responding to a statement on Europe, or an event like the death of Baroness Thatcher. But as we saw with the Syria debate last year, and again today, when the stakes are at their highest he is found wanting.
Another thing we learnt is Miliband is too dependent on his circle of advisers, and that circle itself does not contain enough heavyweight political talent. One or two lines were witty. But had any media or economic adviser to Gordon Brown or Tony Blair or John Smith or Neil Kinnock seen their man rising to head to the chamber to deliver that response they would have barred the door. Though actually, they wouldn’t have had the chance, because if Brown, Blair, Smith or Kinnock had been handed that speech by one of their aides, they’d have sacked them.
But today’s response revealed a much more fundamental weakness surrounding Miliband and his operation. Labour still – I’ve now lost count of the number of times I’ve had to write this same phrase – does not have a coherent strategic economic offer.
In the past, Labour and Tory leaders responding to the Budget have had a basic economic and political framework upon which they could rest their response. Whatever their opponents unveiled, they could assess it against their own plans, and tailor their reply accordingly.
Labour has no economic strategy. It has no economic plan of its own. And therefore Miliband had no such framework.
That was most evident when he stated to deploy Labour’s latest line of attack, which is that the Tories have raised taxes too much. This is the same Labour Party that is pledging to increase spending, reverse Tory cuts like the Bedroom Tax, and eradicate the deficit.
Labour has had some success with it’s “cost of living” critique. It’s also done a decent job of painting the Tory party as out of touch, and distant from ordinary working people. But it cannot go on like this. If Labour wants to have any prospect of forming a government in 2015 it has to come up with something that resembles an economic policy. The party cannot continue to do what it did today, which is to send its leader into the House of Commons chamber to scream “you smell!” at the government front bench.
Miliband may – by some quirk of fate – one day become prime minister. But his performance this afternoon showed he is not yet ready for the job. Not even close.
Failure to Connect (20 March 2014)
I've watched every Labour leader from Neil Ninnock to Ed Miliband deliver a response to Chancellor's budget speech, but yesterday's effort by Ed Miliband was the worst I can remember.
Now the task is not easy because the opposition leader does not have advance sight of the budget speech although, unlike in years gone by, much of the content is leaked to the media long before the big day.
So very little of what the Chancellor is going to say remains a secret even if the Government is able to pull one or two surprise rabbits out of the hat.
The Chancellor George Osborne had the best joke of the day in which he compared Ed Miliband to the King John, describing him as a 'weak' leader compared to his elder brother (King Richard aka David Miliband) and in thrall to a small band of barons (union barons, of course).
Now to their credit Ed and the opposition benches enjoyed this joke at their own expense not least because it was well delivered and funny, but when Ed stood up to respond he was dull, repetitive and uninspiring - his line of attack being that this was the 'same old Tories'.
Now this is a silly argument if you ask me, which makes about as much sense as going on about the Prime Minister's private education at Eton or his juvenile antics as a student.
Because it makes about as much sense as saying that Ed Miliband is really the same as his father, the well-known Marxist academic Ralph Miliband whose view of politics and 'democratic socialism' were very different in the 1970s and 80s to the views that his younger son holds today.
Just as David Cameron is a very different kind of Conservative leader compared to Margaret Thatcher over 30 years ago, so while I like a political bust-up as much as the next person I think it's important that what you say should be convincing and believable.
The other reason the Coalition Government is not the 'same old Tories' is that another party, the Liberal Democrats, are part of the Government as well which is a good thing, in my view, and you can see the evidence of the Lib Dem contribution in the new money for child care, for example, and in the decision to raise the tax threshold or the rate at which people start to pay tax to £10,500.
So while I remember cheering on Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair on budget day, in years gone by, to my mind Ed Miliband fell flat on his face or to put things in boxing parlance - he failed to land a single punch.
