Labour Party Conference 2011

The Guardian reports on Ed Milliband's high rish speech here:

Ed Milliband said he was "up for the fight" as he set out his vision for Britain and how Labour could regain the trust of the public. 

Ed Miliband has promised to rip up decades of irresponsible "fast buck" capitalism in the most radical analysis of Britain's plight offered by any Labour leader since 1945.

In a high-risk speech to the Labour conference in Liverpool, Miliband presented himself as the man "willing to break the consensus rather than succumb to it".

He promised a tough fight to recast a new capitalism built around British values that reward the hard-working grafters and producers in business, and not the asset-stripping "predators".

Miliband's aides insisted the speech did not represent a lurch to the left, as immediately claimed by the Conservatives, but instead a decisive break from "a something for nothing" system that grew up under Thatcherism and that New Labour had been unable to correct.

"Britain's problems stemmed from the way we have chosen to run our country, not just for a year or so, but for decades," Miliband said. New Labour "had brought good times, but this did not mean we had a good economic system. We changed the fabric of our country, but we did not do enough to change the values of our country."

Accusing David Cameron of being the last gasp of an old system, he said the country was crying out for a society in which the hard-working grafters are rewarded and the closed circles at the top of society are broken up.

He promised to regulate and tax companies according to whether firms invested for the long term, rather than for the fast buck, recruiting apprentices and not simply stripping assets.


Ed Miliband with his wife Justine after his conference speech, which aides insisted did not represent a lurch to the left. Photograph: Andrew Yates/AFP

Miliband's pedestrian, drooping delivery did no justice to the ambition of his argument, leaving the packed conference hall sometimes flat.