Having failed to show just how much he really loved business two weeks ago by deciding he couldn’t be bothered to turn up to the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference, Ed Miliband was keen to make amends. If the EEF manufacturers’ organisation conference wasn’t a red-letter day in its members’ diaries, it was for the Labour leader. This was his chance to love-bomb industry: it was also the ideal chance to say absolutely nothing at all.
“I want to congratulate you, the backbone of business in Britain,” he began. “I want to congratulate you for everything you do for this country.” Everything. For the way they had got out of bed that morning to heroically fight the odds and make it to the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre. For the way they – well, most of them – had managed to keep their eyes open until lunchtime. The sincerity just about made it as far as the second row.
It had been three years since Miliband last attended the conference and the Labour leader didn’t know where the time had gone. Try to keep me away next year, his eyes smouldered. The organisers just might. “I have always believed in ‘Made in Britain’,” he said, as if that label was an article of faith, “and we have listened and I have learned from your members.” And what he had learned was that they had a shared mission to build a prosperity that reached everyone’s kitchen tables. The cutlery manufacturers in the hall perked up a bit.
Forget the Conservative long-term economic plan; that was pedestrian and prosaic. What he was offering was a 10-year mission in which all young people would either become apprentices or not become apprentices, depending on whether they were clever enough to be apprentices; in which more money would be available for small businesses – subject to the usual terms and conditions of any small print; in which the Local Enterprise Partnerships would not be abolished but be made more LEP-like. There was a lot of LEP love.
We need a thriving London, he continued, but we also needed other places to thrive, too. His mission, should they choose him to accept it, would be to make Britain thrive. There was just one more thing. “We must not sleepwalk out of the EU,” he said. Sleep-talking was apparently just fine. As was just sleeping.
“Was it you who was saying something about apprenticeships?” asked a member of the audience who had entered a dream-like dystopian trance. It was indeed, Miliband confirmed. “Ah, good, good,” the man continued. “In which case, perhaps you can explain what would happen to all those young people who didn’t manage to achieve the gold standard qualification in maths and English they will require to become an apprentice?”
“Let me answer that question,” Miliband ad-libbed, “because it’s obviously a question. There’s a big issue of balance which is why I am talking about balancing … ” The balancing turned out to be so complicated he couldn’t give any details about the apprenticeship qualification scheme. There were, though, strengths he was going to build on and he would keep listening, even if no one else was.
Just as Miliband was telling everyone that the future depended on them, a member of the audience suggested Labour’s energy price policies would switch off the country’s electricity supply. It sounded more like wish fulfilment than a question. That was thirty minutes of everyone’s life that no one will ever get back.
