That Ed Milliband Speech in full (3)

[check against delivery]

Hello and welcome to Manchester.

I'm not very sure what to talk about today. I've been leader for two years, and I'm feeling so old my memory is going.

My son tells me I should be talking about dinosaurs, and that seems as good an idea as any.

Anyway instead of making a speech today I'm going to do what my image advisors keep telling me to do and tell you my story.

I was born in a hospital and went to a school. Just like you normal people.

I wouldn't be standing here today without an education from one of the most exclusive comprehensive schools in the country.

My parents instilled in me a sense of duty to get on with my brother. [shrugs]

I believe we shall overcome, nuns in a convent, over the alps to Switzerland. This is my faith.

Of course my parents didn't tell me what career to go into. And they are both so scarily left-wing, they must be ashamed of me. Or maybe I show them a different face to what I show you.

That is my faith. Those are my two faithes.

When I think of normal person I met I think how full of positive empathic energy she was. And then she told me her story. It was a better story than this one.

When I think of small business person I met I feel so touchy-feely, I'm in danger of touching myself here on stage.

Why is it that the gas and electricity bill just goes up and up? [Should I mention my time as Energy Secretary?  Ed. No, you fool]

Hooray for the olympics and paralympics. We succeeded because of the 70,000 games makers all of whom are here with us today. [We'll need a bigger hall. Ed]

Hooray for the troops. Hooray for the police. Hooray for Seb Coe and Tessa Jowell.

And Hooray for us. [What about all the elite athletes - do we mention them? Ed]

That sense of a country united. I can't remember a time like it since the country rejected Michael Foot.

Bejamin Disraeli - Clement Atlee - One Nation [Tory? Ed] - that is my vision, that is the Britain we must become.

But Labour's failures on youth unemployment, the increasing gap between rich and poor, and a welfare system that fails to make work pay, has stood in the way of these things. [Er, I'm a bit worried people will notice I am praising coalition policy. Ed]

So who can do this? What about the Tories. [murmur of agreement from the crowd] Wrong answer. What about the Tories [boos from the crowd]

Borrowing borrowing borrowing borrowing. We are against the government doing this. We want them to do more of it and/or less of it. But the opposite is true.

The problem is the British people are paying the price of the last governments failure. [This government surely? Ed. Sorry.]

What do they choose as their priority at this time? A tax cut for milliionaires like me, balanced by caps on reliefs that will raise five times as much from millionaires like me. [better not mention the last bit]

How can we justify the unfairness in 2012 of ignoring the whole balance of the tax package when criticising it? We have to do it or we will have nothing to say in this speech. I mean story.

Remember the people's budget of 1909 that was blocked by the House of Lords? We have sunk Lords reform so that it would be blocked again.

My advisors tell me to attack on the issue of competence because we are rightly seen as weak there.

Ooohh silly Tory toffs look tee hee. You wont find that kind of privilege among Islington and Hampstead millionaires like myself.

So we disagree and agree with the government on welfare reform.

And we agree with many of the government cuts, and we agree that those with the broadest shoulders will bear the greatest burden. I will never support a top rate as low as 45p, that's just wrong. That's why our party had it at 40p. One nation can be two-faced nation.

There is no future for this party as a party of one sectional interest, led by a man bought and paid for by the unions.

In One Nation, no interest from Murdoch to the banks will be too powerful to be held to account. [So why didn't we set up Leveson and Vickers? Ed]

Think about small business person who was ripped of by his bank thanks to our failure to regulate. We will do something about this if it hasn't been done already.

To be a One Nation economy, you see, you have to support coalition policies in all these areas. Let's pretend there aren't a million extra apprenticeships under the coalition and talk as if we've just thought of the idea.

So we'll now focus on the forgotten 50% who don't go to university - by making them pay higher taxes to support the tuition of those who do go.

We will make apprenticeships a condition of public contracts. And I'll talk for a bit about coalition policy on apprenticeships as if it were ours. But focusing on the public sector.

Michael Gove. Tee hee. He wanted to bring back a two tier system, but the Liberal Democrats wouldn't have it.

We can bring about this one nation economy by removing clarity from accounting standards, and by putting up barriers to trade. Because that's never gone wrong, no sir.

I want us to engage with Europe and the rest of the world. Too often in the past we have been tolerant of immigration where it might benefit our economy and society. So this is something I will do differently. The last Labour government did too little to win the "bigot" vote.

Scotland could leave the United Kingdom, but we would be much worse off as a result. Not just in pounds and pence but also in the electoral prospects of the Labour Party.

Hooray for the NHS. I'm so pleased it still exists despite everything we said about the reforms.

What a scoundrel Cameron is. The Labour Party would never do a top-down reorganisation of the NHS.

So I'm going to pretend for a bit that the NHS has been abolished, because that will get you fired up.

The worst thing for me about these reforms is how they were designed around Blairite values. It proves the old adage: You just can't trust New Labour on the NHS.

So let me be unclear. The next Labour government will repeal something.

So that's my speech, I mean story.

I was talking to my mum. Not about dinosaurs this time.

Who in this generation will fight them on the beaches, and on the landing grounds? It's not some impossible dream. One nation under labour can fight these [other] dinosaurs. Thankyou very much.

Review of The Alternative View by Lembit Opik

I haven't read it and I'm not going to.

The problem with the EU is that it is the same as the UK

Endorsing and responding to this and this.

Do not throw at me the policies and structures of the EU. I want the EU to have better, more liberal policies and better, more democratic structures. This is the same as what I want for the UK.

The reason the EU doesn't have these things is because it is dominated by socialist and conservative politics; the same as the UK.

And yet I will not cry and take my ball home, and demand secession from the UK and the EU. Our interests lie in engaging with the politics of both and working to make them better.

Yet just as my support for the localism agenda in the UK does not make me a secessionist, it should be possible to have a sober debate about EU competencies without it becoming a proxy for the hare-brained withdrawal agenda.

Our best interests are served by a strong and democratic EU, acting on trade, the environment, cross-border crime, security and in the international community. The entrenchment of democracy in Eastern Europe is unlikely to have happened without the EU. And much of it might easily have fallen back into Russia's sphere of influence. A quadrillion pounds of defence spending could not have achieved this kind of progress for democracy and the rule of law, which is in all our interests.

This should not be taken to imply support for any particular socialist or conservative policy adopted by the EU at the behest of the conservative and socialist national governments that control it. Given this political dominance it is a small miracle that the policies of the EU (or UK) are as good as they are.

No. The demands for localism and democratic reform are not predicated on the belief that liberals will suddenly win all the arguments and all the elections under a more democratic system. Rather that politicians of whatever party will be more accountable to the people and will therefore make better decisions.

Eurosceptics of left and right, in common with the SNP have a very quaint belief that the political challenges they face can be attributed to some evil outside force, and if only "they" could be got rid of then "we" can put things right. The use of "they" and "we" is pure emotional button-pushing, and quite arbitrary. Yet the challenges in Scotland are not that different to those in the rest of the UK, nor those in the UK very different to the rest of the continent. Scapegoating the other is cheap and dangerous politics.

So what I am advocating here is not a compromise between the Europhiles and Eurosceptics. I am uncompromisingly in favour of the EU, and of a particular liberal democratic vision of it, and against the policies of socialists and conservatives that stand in the way of that vision; against those policies when they are implemented at the EU level just as much as when they are implemented elsewhere. This means campaigning against the EU "government of the day" in the same way that we would campaign against a similarly wrong UK or local government.

Axe the fat tax

The idea of an extra tax on high-fat foods has been in the news lately, since David Cameron suggested that the idea was worth looking at. Now I've argued before against activism through the tax system. I think most of the time it creates too much administration cost and avenues for avoidance for any good that it does. And I am skeptical of the psychological value of small incentives to do the right thing, which it turns out can often be counterproductive.

In this case the fat tax is intended to tackle the "epidemic" of obesity. But it is not a tax on fat people, but on selected foods deemed to contribute to obesity. Why? I'm pretty sure that it is possible for a thin person to eat doughnuts, and for an obese frame to be maintained with sufficient quantities of muesli and semi skimmed milk. More specifically the argument is precisely that fattening foods are a problem, because it is a problem that people are fat. So a tax on fat people would surely be much more to the point. Yes, there are practical difficulties with a tax on fat people. All that weighing. But let's park that for now and just consider the principle.

The problem is that a tax on fat people would be grossly unfair, offensive and discriminatory. Thus the attempt to levy an extra tax on fat people by proxy, in the hope that we thereby don't notice that the policy is grossly unfair, offensive and discriminatory.

I've had some feedback on this argument from @IanEiloart, @beccaet and @MsNoeticat, which I will address here without attributing particular views to any one person. Thanks for your comments, by the way.

First is the question of whether a fat tax would produce a social benefit by incentivising food manufacturers to change their recipes in a lower fat direction, i.e. to make their regular products more like "diet" products. You know diet coke, diet yoghurt, diet ready meals. All the bulk of the regular product with little of the flavour. There's a reason I don't buy diet products: they are horrid. Making food in general more horrid is not something I would count as a social benefit. Just as starving sailors lost at sea would fill their bellies with sawdust to quell the hunger pangs, the modern body-image conscious person is supposed to fill their belly with a modern food-sciencey equivalent such as cellulose (which may be made from sawdust in fact).

Second is the point that pushing diets in the right direction will benefit everybody. Will it really? Will it benefit people who are underweight? How many borderline anorexics will be pushed over the borderline because they are eating food with more cellulose and less food in it? The problem here is that we are looking at the average person - who may be overweight - and imposing a food policy for everybody, as if everybody was the same as that average person. Many people eat too little fat or too little cholesterol, or too little proper food of any kind. Should they be sacrificed on the altar of the average? Top down, one-size-fits-all policies fit very few.

Finally the suggestion that revenue from a fat tax could be help people who are struggling with weight issues. This is true. And it is fair to say that weight is a very big problem for some people, causing a great deal of distress and poor health outcomes. I do think a fat tax would have to be very high indeed in order to help everybody in this kind of need, which raises the question of why isn't this kind of health support more of a priority anyway? Why should it rely on a hypothecated tax? We don't hypothecate tobacco and alcohol taxes to particular health interventions, and nor should we.

And I would say that a large part of the distress surrounding weight issues is a result of social pressures to conform to a perceived weight ideal. Now what is the fat tax, but another kind of pressure to conform to that same perceived ideal? On the one hand we are campaigning against unrealistic body images in the media; do we really want to turn round and try to impose unrealistic bodies on people through the tax system?

Update: see also freakonomics.

Ed Milliband's little big idea

While it is easy to lampoon Ed Milliband and the speech he gave to his party conference, he had one big idea that is worth looking at: that of bringing moral values into government's dealings with business, to reward the good and punish the bad.

On the face of it, what could possibly be wrong with that? It is better to have more training, more R&D, better cared for workers, a social conscience, environmental sustainability. Let's reward the companies that go the extra mile to deliver these things, and punish those that merely follow the rules. Companies that merely tick all the boxes and play the rules to their advantage are not giving back to society in the way they should.

Ed was subsequently challenged to give some examples of what he is talking about and failed abysmally. Southern Cross was mentioned as a company that wasn't giving back, but of course that was in the process of it failing as a business. Let's punish failure with higher taxes? The problem is that it isn't obvious who the good guys and the bad guys are. If you can't even say which companies you think ought to be punished for existing, how are you ever going to write laws to fairly judge the predators from the producers?

The challenge here is to turn good intentions into good policy. Ed's project has been tried before with almost no success under the banner of stakeholderism. Stakeholderism held that workers, suppliers, consumers, the wider community and the environment all had a stake in a business, not just the shareholders, so businesses should be run with all these stakes in mind. But put workers, suppliers and consumers on the board and you get big conflicts of interest. So little policy was ever developed to implement this vision beyond saying "you really ought to think about this stuff". I have written about stakeholderism before, and it all still applies to Milliband's new compact.

While it is possible and necessary to regulate for such things as environmental standards and workers rights, it is logically impossible for a regulation to meaningfully say that you must go the extra mile, beyond ticking all the boxes, because every regulation is precisely one of the boxes to tick. So you can't legislate for virtue.

And while tax breaks for R&D, support for apprenticeships and so forth are reasonable attempts to improve incentives, they don't reward virtue, they are attempts to steer self interest towards more public spirited goals. If Ed's vision means another avalanche of schemes and tax loopholes aimed at rewarding virtue, it will be met head on by an avalanche of tax accountants for whom virtue is not the pressing concern. This is no new vision, this is very much Gordon Brown's signature move of trying to micromanage behaviour through the tax system, giving us one of the most complex tax codes in the world and record levels of tax avoidance.

And let's not forget that creating jobs and providing goods and services are a positive contribution to society. We might like more training and R&D, but there are few businesses that could exist without ever doing any of either. Is Labour just too uncomfortable with the fact that business generally makes a big positive contribution to society even without being tinkered with by government?

So Ed, I hope you enjoyed telling your conference that you will stand up for what is right and oppose what is wrong. It is a fine and noble ambition, albeit somewhat unoriginal. But if you can give it any substance at all, that will be an achievement. Failing that, a mountain of regulation motivated by good intentions is the best and worst we can expect.