Maybe Ed Miliband’s inner social democrat thinks that it is clever politics to combine a spot of banker bashing with a ritual middle market tabloid-style denunciation of dole scroungers.
After all, you would probably have to go back well before 1994 to find a speech from a Labour leader as openly critical of the City as some passages to be heard in the one he delivered today.
Although commentators have flagged up the entire address as a paean to the legacy of Peter Mandelson, there are certainly more charitable ways of reading it. In particular, Miliband’s pointed observation that Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about what happened at the top’ looks rather more like criticism than praise to me.
Yet were this the sole focus of the text, the rightwing media would hold up these words as further evidence of Red Ed’s incorrigible neo-Bennism. Presumably to combat precisely this danger, thrown into the mix were an expansive panegyric to the deserving rich, in conjunction with a blast at the undeserving rich and the undeserving poor alike.
What particularly stood out was the juxtaposition of condemnation for Sir Frederick Anderson Goodwin and censure of benefit cheats. The superficial logic at work here is that Fred the Shred and the bloke who cleans windows while signing on are both ‘ripping off society’, and thus merit equal moral disapprobation.
The only real problem with that argument is the question of scale. Welfare fraud does happen, of course. The point is that it does not happen anywhere near as often as it suits the political right to suggest. Less than 1% of claims are fraudulent, leaving tax payer out of pocket to the tune of £1bn a year.
By contrast, the cost of the bank bailout will not be known for a long time to come. One provisional estimate put the outlay in Britain alone at £850bn. Not all of that is cash money, and some of it will be recouped. But the figures help to establish some sort of relative weighting.
Unfortunately, a politician starting from Ed Miliband’s baseline assumptions has little choice but to attempt to equate the essentially imcomparible.
I hope the tactic pays off, I really do. As the saying doesn’t go, sometimes confusion is the homage virtue pays to Daily Mail headline writers.
