Miliband's ten year plan.

Miliband senior was no Stalinist so Ed didn't get his idea for a plan from dad. Commentators round the Labour Party Conference in Manchester made some sad jokes about Stalin only having 5 year plans. Was the steely Miliband twice as good? 

Stalin and his successors had a lot to answer for as a result of their undemocratic, brutal and often disastrous planning regime, but at least the memory of the revolution had given them some ambition!  Miliband's ten year plan proposed meagre outcomes and contained no planning whatsoever.

The only significant suggestions that Miliband made were that his NHS proposals (for 36000 new personnel by 2025, when the projected population rise will mean Miliband's plan will provide about the same ratio of NHS staff to patients as now) would not require any increase of the deficit. Tax loopholes would be closed (again.) Houses valued £2 million plus would attract tax (the LibDem policy) and tobacco companies would face a profit tax. (Unless they were centred in a British tax haven.)  The rest, like a Green Bank or an unspecified housing policy that would provide 'as many houses as we need' by 2025, were purest fluff, or, like the reaction to Miliband's statement that his plan was to deal with 'the biggest fall in living standards since 1871' there would be a 'bigger reform of banks' and that the 'unions and government should cooperate.' As Balls made clear yesterday, unions will need to cooperate with austerity for the foreseeable future. 

Miliband junior is no Marxist. Nevertheless you would have expected him to make an attempt at a link between the economy and his political and social projects, however empty they may be. Admittedly Miliband understood some of the lessons from the recent Scottish independence vote and proposes enfranchising 16 and 17 year olds. (One wonders if they will lose their vote again if they refuse a £3 per hour apprenticeship - also to be widely 'on offer'.) He has also honoured a new factotum aiming to bring the rest of the world up to speed with Britain's apparently enlightened LGBT policy! But nowhere in his epic peroration did he tell us Labour's 2 year, 5 year or 10 year plan to shift the wealth and power between the super rich - getting richer, and the rest of us. What will he DO about the £ billions of NHS resources now in the hands of the privateers?: what will he do about the annual £4 billion subsidy to the private railways - for an overcrowded and overpriced service?: what does his ten year plan say about wage freezes; anti union laws; foreign wars and the £40 billion cost of nukes? Nothing. They are not part of Ed's 10 year plan. They are all part of the 'business as usual' silent part of his speech. 

Miliband hopes that his £2.5 billion a year for the NHS (which will not cover the planned £20 billion deficit in 2015) and his promise that he is sticking to the EU will cover both the working class vote AND big business's interests. 'We'll do it together' he says. Do what? Plan to keep the status quo. Plan to get Miliband into number 10. But I'm afraid Ed, it's all gone much further than you planned.