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Cut all connections to Blair, and you might stand a chance.

David A Lindsay, what exactly does "The One makes The Nation" mean? It sounds a bit mystical, I have to say. So public services, the welfare state and public ownership bind together The Union-really? Do you really believe that a postwar history of well meaning state intervention coupled with botched municipalism and special interest politics is of any more relevance to the UK than the preceding 100 years of imperial expansion?
My point is that they're both equally redundant in the face of the questions of English and Scottish identity and political self-expression. Only last week the leader of the Labour Party in Scotland pulled the plug on a commitment to universal benefits, then followed it up with a tacit acceptance of the likelihood of devo max. In Scotland the Tories and the Lib Dems are an irrelevance, as you know. The only real players are the SNP and Labour, and the latter has been entirely reactive for the last five years, with no genuine initiative, coherent policy, or self-belief. The union is dying: any genuine progressive or liberal in Scotland or England should be glad of that. Only reactionaries on the left or right will mourn it.

One thing Ed Miliband said was
"Have you ever seen a more incompetent, hopeless, out-of-touch, U-turning, pledge-breaking, make it up as we go along, back of the envelope miserable shower than this Prime Minister and this government?"
Sound's just like Gordan Brown government to me you know the government that you and Ed Balls were ministers in

There wasnt too much different from the conservative party and tories, the differences really are paper thin. I preferred the balls speech.

Political pygmies Ed Miliband and David Cameron are not fit to be described in the same light as great Gladstone or Disraeli.

Oh, Ed, you're so wunnerful, oh Ed, oh please please reward me with a place in a think tank or a safe seat or an interview when you is da PM....purleeze. What a grovelling piece of sycophancy.

WHEN Ed Miliband was running against his brother David for the leadership of the Labour Party, we were told “Ed speaks human”. Last week he gave a big speech promoting his big new idea of “predistribution”. Presumably “predistribution” is like when you legally divide up your parents’ multi-million-pound house into three parts so that when you inherit the North London home in Primrose Hill you avoid hefty inheritance taxes. Which is exactly what Ed and David Miliband did.

With his One Nation rhetoric he just cancelled out Wales, Scotland and N.I who are very proud of their small nations within UK. It already frustrates us especially in Scotland when we hear or read from Americans that England = UK/Britain. Miliband has just extended that even further worldwide into the way people perceive the Britain/UK...that the rest of us are just regions of it and thats very, very insulting to Wales, Scotland and N.Ireland! One Nation is as much of a lie as All In It Together!

That the Conservative Party has for so long supported the "free" market, contrary to its own history, is because it has for so long been dominated by people who are not in fact conservatives at all, but rather Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, and so forth, exemplified in part by Alderman Alfred Roberts (who sat as an Independent while the Liberal Party collapsed around him, never joining the Conservative Party to his dying day), and thus above all by his daughter, Margaret Thatcher.

In fact, Toryism in its Disraelian classical form has far more in common with Labourism in its classical, also very Disraelian, form than either has with this Gladstonian Liberalism. Labourism agrees wholeheartedly both with the importance of defending the conservative values and with the "free" market's self-evidently destructive effects upon them, but goes further in proposing, specifically, the universal and comprehensive Welfare State (including, for example, farm subsidies) and the strong statutory and other, including trade union, protection of workers, consumers, communities and the environment, the former paid for by progressive taxation, the whole underwritten by full employment, and all these good things delivered by the partnership between a strong Parliament and strong local government.

Albeit with differences as to detail, this has always been acceptable to Tories, but certainly not to Thatcherites, since Thatcher was not a Tory (i.e., a Disraelian), but, like her father, a Gladstonian, a Whig, a Liberal. In fact, far more of the Tory populist heritage was carried over into the emerging Labour Movement than into the Conservative Party. The former took over Radical Liberalism or Tory populism in accordance with the local political culture on the ground, whereas the latter has always been a wholesale Liberal takeover of the Tory machine, effectively compelling Tory voters to support Liberal politicians, not least by pretending that the aspirations of such electors had nothing in common with the only viable alternative since the end of the First World War. This Government and the public reaction to it ought to have finished off those fantasies once and for all, and it looks more and more as if they have indeed done so. Especially after this afternoon.

Furthermore, since Gladstonians favour unregulated markets, they therefore also favour the use of armed force to secure that global state of affairs, which they see as necessary for the emergence and defence of democratic institutions. By contrast, we Disraelians see such economic arrangements as subversive both of those institutions and of the values that, among other good things, sustain them; accordingly, we are immensely cautious about adventures abroad. The rising Chinese superpower confirms our belief that the "free" market not only subverts democratic institutions and their necessary underlying values, but prevents those institutions from developing where they do not already exist.

David Cameron, like Tony Blair, is a Gladstonian. Ed Miliband is a Disraelian. Let battle commence.