Update  carried also at the Commentator

* * * * *

Here is Ed Miliband’s Labour Conference speech today – in full.

A bad idea to hand out to the print media the same version in micro-sentenced blank verse as used to help the delivery. It looks oddly like something from a Noddy story:

Stock markets round the world falling.

The United States in difficulty.

The Eurozone struggling.

And people in Britain losing their jobs.

Now is not the time for the same old answers.

From us, on the issues that lost us your trust.

From this Government, on the growth crisis we face.

You need to know that there is an alternative.

You need to know that it is credible.

See what I mean? I can’t stand it any more, so I’ll run his words together to make them readable:

Government is cutting back. And the recovery has stalled. Of course, the world economy is suffering.

But our Government is making it worse. Because the current plan to raise taxes and cut spending more dramatically than any other country is not working.

Depends what you mean by ‘working’. If it’s strategically important to get on top of the insane debt levels Labour bequeathed, maybe that pain for a few years has to be part of any cure?

… with such great people, how have we ended up with the problems we face? It’s because of the way we have chosen to run our country. Not just for a year or so but for decades.

Now there are hard lessons here for my party which some won’t like. Some of what happened in the 1980s was right. It was right to let people buy their council houses. It was right to cut tax rates of 60, 70, 80 percent. And it was right to change the rules on the closed shop, on strikes before ballots. These changes were right, and we were wrong to oppose it at the time.

Now you’re talking, Ed! Why were these things ‘right’, and what ‘wrong’ ideas did your party espouse?

We changed the fabric of our country but we did not do enough to change the values of our economy.

Oh. That’s helpful.

And we have seen immigration policy which didn’t work for the people whose jobs, living standards and communities were affected.

Which Party deliberately opened the immigration gates as part of a vast social engineering scheme to make the UK more ‘diverse’? Oops. It didn’t work. Hard-working Poles came 900 miles to take took the jobs which illiterate rioting Yoof from our skools up da road woz too fick to do init. Do better next time. Promise!

We must never excuse people who cheat the welfare system. The reason I talk about this is not because I don’t believe in a welfare state but because I do.

We can never protect and renew it if people believe it’s just not fair. If it’s too easy not to work. And there are people taking something for nothing. And if at the same time people who have paid into the system all their lives find the safety net full of holes. No wonder people are angry.

Er, yes. But who created such a towering system of benefits and disincentivised work? Who howls with rage every time any government tries to curb abuses?

Let me tell you what the 21st century choice is: Are you on the side of the wealth creators or the asset strippers? The producers or the predators?

Ed, calm down. What is taxation to pay for all your ridiculous schemes including the folly of overseas development aid and the CAP and myriad Diversity Coordinators, if it is not predatory asset-stripping, imposed by force?

We need the most competitive tax and regulatory environment we can for British business.

But when I am Prime Minister, how we tax, what government buys, how we regulate, what we celebrate will be in the service of Britain’s producers

Er, no. Because EU laws stop you doing any of that. What’s your plan for wriggling out of that one?

But our energy companies have defied the laws of gravity for too long. Prices go up but they never seem to come down.

You can’t be serious. It is a huge collectivist Climate policy plank to force energy prices higher. Have you filled up a car’s petrol tank recently, Ed? What % of the mad price is tax of some sort or other?

We’ve got to put an end to the idea that those at the top can take whatever they can, regardless of what they give back. It’s why we must end the cosy cartels of the way top pay is set in our economy. So every pay committee should have an employee on the board.

Ed. How a private organisation remunerates its employees is none of your damn business.

So we need a new bargain at the top of society, and in our benefits system too.

A bargain? Hmm. That sounds like an arrangement whereunder the parties, you know, agree on what happens? Not one where the state decides everything, including how private organisations set up their pay scheme committees.

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. And I say every council should recognise the contribution that people are making 

Utter incoherence. But so what? Lots of new jobs for thick social science graduates in the RMP (Responsibility Measurement Police).

And it’s not just in our benefits system that I want to change the way government works. It’s in our public services as well. Millions of public servants deliver a fantastic service every day of every week. But we all know that sometimes powerful organisations can become unaccountable. Work not in the interests of those who need them but in their own interests. That’s what vested interests are.

Thanks for clarifying that. But what are you talking about?

You know what it’s like. You stand in the queue. You hang on the phone. You fill in the form. And then all you get? Computer says no. We need to change that.

To give power to the public. Like the power to the elderly couple to choose whether they are cared for in a care home or in their own home. Or the parents I know struggling with their council on their child’s special needs who want to know who else is facing the same challenges. So I will take on the vested interests wherever they are because that is how we defend the public interest.

So. We’ll have the New VIP (Vested Interest Police) squads to keep an eye on the RMP and the rest of the sprawling bureaucracy, all of which is there to uphold, or is it oppress, the public interest. It’s all so confusing.

But I’m up for the fight. The fight for a new bargain. A new bargain in our economy so reward is linked to effort.

Hurrah! A Flat Tax system does just that! Bring it on!

A new bargain based on your values so we can pay our way in the world. A new bargain to ensure responsibility from top to bottom. And a new bargain to break open the closed circles, and break up vested interests, that hold our country back.

Hurrah! Abolishing all Trades Union privileges and dismantling state education and health monopolies. I vote for that. 

I aspire to be your Prime Minister not for more of the same. But to write a new chapter in our country’s history. The promise of Britain lies in its people. The tragedy of Britain is that it is not being met. My mission. Our mission. To fulfil the promise of each so we fulfil the promise of Britain.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Oh … he’s stopped? After a mere 5830 words or so.

What’s wrong with this speech? No, sniping aside, what’s really wrong with it?

It’s all so thin and phoney, aimed at a sound-bite culture. The words values or value appear 43 times. But repeating the word values like a parrot is, in fact, valueless. 

There are huge interesting things to talk about. The Eurozone and future European architecture. How to manage complexity. Where state action might best work when networked spontaneous order might not do enough. How to use the tax system to deliver incentives. How in fact to give people more choice. Why it made sense to sell council houses and reduce the state’s role – scope for more of that now? How to make ‘national’ policies work in a globalised world. European demographics and pension schemes. Defence policy – heavy manned weapons or myriad unmanned drones? State v individual. Structure v freedom. What in fact these days works well, and why?

Not a single one of these issues appears in any meaningful form. If the one thing the Labour Party ought to have aplenty, it’s intellectuals. Those clever people who swarm in higher education and Islington and Camden, some of whom are very smart and able to think. They should be able to help Ed articulate these tough subjects and more in a light-touch but mentally nourishing way. Is this what Ralph Miliband expected?

Instead we get this blast of lukewarm air, this cumulus of clichés, this infantilised gruel which in its faux soul-searching toughness pretends to be part of an adult diet but evaporates any time you stick in your spoon hunting for some substantial morsel.

Look at the Guardianistas trying to find something intelligent to say about it. If you listen closely you can hear them cringing with embarrassment as they tap away on their smart laptops while sipping their globalised Fair Trade coffee, all provided to them by the greedy uncaring private sector.

Conclusion?

The words values or value appear 43 times. But repeating the word values like a dying parrot is, in fact, valueless.