Labour leader and shadow chancellor confound Tories by criticising strikes and proposed increase in EU budget
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Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are steering clear of the Labour 'comfort zone'. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images
Downing Street assumes that Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are a dream for David Cameron.
As protégés of Gordon Brown, the two forty-somethings have found cosy berths in what Tony Blair's dismissively calls Labour's "comfort zone", according to the No 10 thinking. Miliband and Balls are so heavily dependent on union funding they will never unsettle what George Bush called the "base" by delivering uncomfortable home truths to their party, goes the Downing Street thinking.
But will Downing Street have to revise its thinking after Miliband and Balls confounded the Tories today on the strikes and the EU budget?
• Miliband, who was lampooned in March when he appeared to liken the fight against government cuts to the struggle against apartheid in a speech to a TUC rally, has distanced himself from today's strikes.
This was a big moment for Miliband whose name was booed at today's rally in London, according to my colleague Patrick Wintour. Miliband clearly does not want to make the same mistake as Neil Kinnock who admits he made a grave error when he failed to denounce the less than democratic processes of the NUM which allowed Arthur Scargill to call the year long miner's strike in 1984-85.
Miliband's BBC interview today, in which he described the strikes as "wrong", went viral, according to LabourList. Mark Ferguson, the editor of LabourList, is appalled. This is what Ferguson blogged this evening:
It was cringeworthy viewing of the highest order. It evoked the clumsy attempts of the Brown years. It's a video nasty to rival Brown on expenses and Cameron's Gay Times interview.
Mehdi Hasan, the New Statesman journalist who has recently published a biography of Miliband, agrees with Ferguson. This is what Hasan tweeted in response to Ferguson:
So true. Unbelievably awful, wooden and repetititve interview by Ed M. Weird. Just weird.
So those who never quite subscribed to the New Labour view of the world are unhappy. That is one up for Blair who believes that a successful Labour leader should ceaselessly yank the party out of its "comfort zone" and onto the centre ground. It is also a blow for Cameron who wants to portray Miliband as an instinctive leftie.
• Balls, who has been critical of the speed of the government's deficit reduction plans, criticised the European Commission's proposals to increase the EU budget:
When countries across the EU are having to make tough decisions to get their deficits down after the global financial crisis, these proposals are ill-judged, out of touch and cannot be supported. The European Commission should go back to the drawing board.
The consummate political operator was showing that he is no starry-eyed europhile and, in the process, showing that he is no deficit denier. Balls likes to remind eurosceptic Tories that he played a decisive role in ensuring Britain did not join the euro.
And what of the government's performance today after Miliband and Balls showed they have not lost the knack of pitching at least a couple of tent pegs on the centre ground? Well Francis Maude, the lead minister on the strikes, pulled out of an interview on Channel 4 News at short notice this evening. This followed a less than glorious performance on the Today programme this morning when Evan Davis, the clever economist, pointed out that Lord Hutton's report showed that public sector pensions were already due to decline as a proportion of GDP.
Andrew Sparrow has transcribed Maude's interview. Here is a taste:
ED: Did you say that it was going broke if nothing was done. Because I can only find that graph which shows the cost falling in terms of GDP. It has been repeated so often that it's unaffordable, it's out of control. I just can't see it in his report. He doesn't say it's unaffordable. He says it's not fair. And that's a very different justification for reforming pensions than it's unaffordable.
FM: And he said that if we want the system of defined benefit pensions, which few people elsewhere have, to be sustained into the future, long-term reform is needed.
ED: Is it unaffordable?
FM: It will be unless we make these changes.
ED: That's not what he says.
So a good week for the Labour leadership. But the party faces a long journey back to power. The week might end on a less happy note for Labour if the SNP does well in tonight's Inverclyde byelection.