Ed Miliband Wins Again

The pasty tax abandoned. The caravan tax abandoned. The church tax effectively abandoned. And now, the charity tax abandoned. But those are only the latest U-turns. There have been dozens. Literally more than 30. Doubtless, there will be dozens more yet.

Conservative, even Tory Britain has rallied to the only party opposed to the crippling of provincial economies through the slashing of the spending power of public employees far from London, to the breaking up of the National Health Service with a view to its piecemeal privatisation, to the deregulation of Sunday trading, to the devastation of rural communities through the sale of our Post Office and of our roads (the latter to oil-rich foreign states as such, several of them on the permanent brink of an Islamist coup), to the abolition of Gift Aid, and to the imposition of VAT on church repairs.

Conservative, even Tory Britain has rallied to the only party always to have promised its MPs a free vote on the redefinition of marriage. And conservative, even Tory Britain has rallied to the only party promising a referendum on EU membership. That party and its Leader are setting the agenda. Brilliantly. As the electorate manifestly recognises.

Next up, BAE must be brought it back into public ownership as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces and to no one else, making possible the re-opening, or even the never-closing, of its plants at Newcastle and Washington, among other places. Meanwhile, provided that there is the necessary government action to ensure diversification and thus to preserve skills while rebuilding the manufacturing base, the sale of arms abroad must be banned, perhaps progressively, but altogether in the end.

Ed Miliband and Jon Cruddas, over to you. Again.