Does Magpie Miliband think we're goldfish?

I watched Ed Miliband's speech yesterday and, to give him his due, it's one of the best speeches I'd heard him deliver. He was much more confident and positive than he has been in the past.

His delivery improved and some of his ideas sat quite comfortably with me - I certainly didn't sit through the speech feeling nauseous like I inevitably will when Cameron makes his speech next week.

How could you possibly argue against us all being one nation? Those words, of course, have  a particular resonance up here where we face a referendum which could split us in to two nations within the next 800 days or so. I'm not, by the way, impressed with Labour making out at their conference yesterday that they were the only ones who mattered in the fight against independence.

You don't have to dig very far, though, to see the flaws. There's not much in the way of concrete policy. It's a candy floss speech that nobody could really object to.There are a few specifics that I take issue with, though. Miliband has a nerve if he thinks that we have forgotten what the last Labour Government did.

He slammed the cutting of the top tax rate and had a good go at Nick Clegg for agreeing to it:

How many of his other Cabinet colleagues have cheques in the post from the millionaire’s tax cut? And how can he justify this unfairness in Britain 2012.

So what did Nick Clegg have to say about this very issue last week at our Conference:

At the last budget, we made two big announcements: that we were spending three thousand million pounds increasing the tax-free allowance, and just fifty million pounds reducing the top rate of tax while recouping five times that amount in additional taxes on the wealthiest. I insisted on the first. I conceded the second. But I stand by the package as a whole. Why? Because as liberals, we want to see the tax on work reduced, the tax on unearned wealth increased, and the system as a whole tilted in favour of those on low and middle incomes. The budget delivered all three.

But let me make one thing clear: Now that we have brought the top rate of tax down to 45p - a level, let's not forget, that is still higher than throughout Labour's 13 years in office - there can be no question of reducing it further in this Parliament. All future cuts in personal taxation must pass one clear test: do they help people on low and middle incomes get by and get on? It's as simple as that.

Who has been making the running on wealth taxes these last few weeks? Nick Clegg, not Ed Miliband.

Ed Miliband forgets that the Coalition put up Capital Gains Tax by 10% at the insistence of the Liberal Democrats. Under Labour, the wealthiest only paid 18%, a situation that brought about that example Nick used of a zillionaire banker paying a lower marginal rate of tax than his cleaner on the minimum wage. That's the sort of tax system the Government of which Ed Miliband was a member presided over.

And, ok, we had to agree to a drop in the 45p rate, but what we got back was more in taxation on the wealthy and more enforcement work on them. But look what we got for it - by next April, each low income house will have had their tax bill cut by £445 a year by the Liberal Democrats.

And look at what this means for someone on the minimum wage, who handed more than a grand to Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown every year when they were in power.

And the Liberal Democrats intend to take that down to zero in the next Parliament.It's good to see that Manchester residents and Labour Conference delegates are seeing this message on a poster van at the Labour Conference as Kat Dadswell tweeted earlier.

It's a far cry from the 10p tax debacle under Labour.

Now, let's look at what Ed said about the gap between rich and poor.

Those with the broadest shoulders will always bear the greatest burden. I would never cut taxes for millionaires and raise them on ordinary families. That is wrong, that is not being One Nation. And here is the other thing, I will never accept an economy where the gap between rich and poor just grows wider and wider. In One Nation, in my faith, inequality matters. It matters to our country.

If that broadest shoulders remark looks familiar, well, Nick Clegg says it all the time. In fact, almost a year ago, the Daily Fail reported on his plans for a "tax raid on the super rich."

The next situation actually made me burst out laughing.

We need a One Nation economy and the first big mission of the next Labour government is to sort out our banks. Sort them out once and for all. Not just to prevent another crisis but to do what hasn’t been done in decades. Necessary to enable us to pay our way in the world. We need banks that serve the country not a country that serves its banks.

Ok, these are the people who for 13 years pretty much let the banks do what they like. They knighted Fred Goodwin. It's this coalition, directed by Vince Cable, who will sort them out.

Mark Pack pointed out yesterday how Magpie Miliband claimed four new big ideas which are already being done by the Liberal Democrats in Government. They are: more house building, a business bank, more apprenticeships (up 60% since Labour's last year) and separating retail and investment banking.

It is just two and a half years since Labour were last in power. Ed Miliband think we will have forgotten how they crashed the economy, how they taxed the poorest more and the wealthy less than the Liberal Democrats have assured in the Coalition. We're elephants, Ed, not goldfish. We won't forget.

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I've not got much love for Ed's Bargain Basement with the nasties in the dark corners #lab11

So, yesterday afternoon, Ed Miliband gave his first proper speech to the Labour Conference. The first, last year, was written hastily after his unexpected victory, but he's had a bit longer to think about this one. Why, then, was last year's better?

And all he could come up with was a so-called "new bargain". That seems to basically mean that those same large corporations and media organisations (Murdoch, anyone?) that Labour sucked up to for years are to re-designated evil and be made to stop ripping us off.  The former energy secretary mentioned energy companies and their rigged market. That same market he did nothing about in office. It takes some nerve to make a campaign issue out of your own failings, I'll give him that.

His speech was all over the place. He went rather clunkily from talking about the operation on his nose to praising Harriet Harman in a handful of words. The structure was all wrong - he'd start a paragraph as though he were addressing Conference but would switch back and forth between addressing Labour and the British people. It just didn't flow.

And somebody really does need to get Ed in a room and sort out his delivery. So many times, interludes for applause saw him make some really weird smirks. He tripped over words and he looked terrified up there.

I think the striking thing was that he was in front of a grey, lifeless backdrop which replaced the usual red, or purple as they adopted for a while. It reflected the lack of ideas and general vacuousness coming from Labour at the moment. I mean, this is their showcase, and so far the best they've come up with is a plan to reduce tuition fees which will make no difference to most people on ordinary incomes and a bizarre idea from the shadow Culture Secretary Ivan Lewis that could have led to the state regulation of journalists.

Now that Ed has the freedom to choose his Shadow Cabinet, we can but hope that Mr Lewis will be sent to the back benches. What gets me is that these speeches aren't delivered in isolation. Somebody will have had to have seen them in advance. If the draft set no alarm bells ringing, that shows that Labour's authoritarian streak runs deep. They just look stupid now, with Lewis having had to sheepishly almost immediately afterwards.

But back to Ed's speech, and thanks to the Torygraph for printing it in full. By far the nastiest bit was his assertion that:

Take social housing.

When we have a housing shortage, choices have to be made.

Do we treat the person who contributes to their community the same as the person who doesn’t?

My answer is no.

Our first duty should be to help the person who shows responsibility.

Should the answer not be to build more affordable housing?

You have to wonder what sort of character test people would have to pass in order to get a council house. Do we just let nice people have housing or do they have to do good works in their communities as well as being nice?

And what do you do to the family with one troubled child who's causing problems - make the entire family homeless? They have to live somewhere. How is this going to help anyone?

Hearing this sort of ill thought out populist bile coming from the mouth of a Labour leader still makes me feel sick. It's bad enough, but expected in a way, to hear it from a Tory. It's become a bit of a triumph of hope over experience to expect any better from Labour but somehow a corner of my heart still does.

So, if you are struggling with various problems in your life, addiction, illness, a child with behavioural issues, despite Florence and Machine's song playing in the background after the speech, you'll find that Ed and Labour don't have love for you.

The Ultimate in Wishful Thinking

I've just seen a Facebook status update from a Labour person saying that he was wondering if the rumours were true that Barack Obama was going to address the Labour Conference tomorrow.

I remember my mother once, at a time of huge tension in the family, inviting some guests over for Christmas in the hope that that everybody would behave with visitors in the house. In the unlikely event that this rumour is true, then it would be that kind of thing on a bigger scale.

However, I am fairly certain that Obama associating himself with a dying Labour Government would not go down so well with the voters back home.

I guess this is just a bit of wishful thinking, or too much booze at the lunchtime fringe.......