Ed Miliband launches his vision for a 'new society and ethics'

By Andrew Rawnsley and Toby Helm guardian.co.uk

Ed Miliband can't be bothered, so he says. Not with opinion polls, not with critics and not even with a recent biography of himself. He has not read it, instead choosing to spend his riot-interrupted summer holiday immersed in bleak Scandinavian crime fiction. He also read One Day, David Nicholls's novel about a doomed relationship. "It's a really depressing book" is the verdict from the Labour leader.

Miliband is otherwise looking rather cheerful. And so he ought to be – superficially, at least. Crashes on the financial markets and grim growth forecasts are providing daily ammunition for his critique of what he calls "the government's addiction to austerity". The latest issue of the Tory-supporting Spectator magazine even describes him as "terrifyingly close to power".

He has won himself the right to choose his own shadow cabinet, though he is coy about when he will exercise that power to improve what many see as a top team that is not firing on all cylinders. He does not rule out a reshuffle after the party conference. Most of all, he feels that the themes he has tried to articulate over the past 12 months are beginning to catch fire with the voters, even if they haven't excited all of the media.

"The things that I've talked about over the last year – the squeeze on living standards, the threat to the chances of young people, and irresponsibility at the top and at the bottom – a year on you find everybody is talking about those issues. So we've got the right strategy."

This is a riposte to the band of doubters, including senior people in his own ranks, who question whether he has a strategy or believe that he has embarked on a losing trajectory. "I'm very clear about the strategy. I'm very clear we're doing the right thing. It's not the conventional opposition playbook. What is the conventional opposition playbook? You maybe pick a fight in your own party or you engage in a piece of positioning, which is what [David] Cameron did."

Miliband's conception of himself is as a leader who says: "I'm going to do the right thing and I'm going to speak out on the things that matter, as I've done on everything from strikes to Rupert Murdoch."

Admirers of Miliband think that he is impressively calm, which certainly makes a change from his tempestuous predecessor. Critics say he is far too relaxed about the challenge facing Labour. In their view he is also far too slow, although his older brother would probably not agree. Too slow to see that Gordon Brown was a disastrous prime minister; too slow to get married; too slow to mark out a clear direction of travel for his party that would have it ready for power by the time of the next election. He still won't criticise his old patron. He doesn't agree about his nuptials. "We do things our own way."

As for his leadership, he insists that he is boldness personified and has become more so over the 12 months he has been Labour leader.

"What's the biggest lesson I've learned while I have been leader? It goes back to phone hacking." His widely praised decision to denounce Murdoch, which looked riskier then than it does now, after everyone joined in attacking the media mogul, "was a really important lesson about leadership". The lesson being: "You've got to take risks. You're not going to be liked. You've got to take risks. You've got to tell it like it is. The most important lesson for my party is that we are not going to get back into power by saying let's carry on where we left off in 2010. We are not going to get back into power by saying the other lot are crap.

"We've actually got to show there is a different way of doing things. And, you know, I think the country is actually up for this moment of reckoning."

At the core of Miliband's beliefs is a conviction that British voters are ready to break from what he calls "the old settlement" established by Margaret Thatcher and largely continued by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. "I think there is a new centre ground in politics. And this is where I am moving on from New Labour. The old centre ground said you would demand responsibility at the bottom, but you don't talk about it at the top because there are vested interests that are too powerful to take on. You can't take on Rupert Murdoch, you can't take on the energy companies, you can't take on the banks. There's a new centre ground about saying inequality is not just a problem because of the gap between the rich and poor, but between the rich and everybody else."

These were Labour's greatest failings in government: "We left a lot of the old institutions in place – the dominance of finance over industry"; "we didn't change the ethic of our economy"; and "we didn't really tackle inequality. We leaned against it, but inequality either grew or stayed the same, depending on which figures you look at."

His conference speech – "which is sort of written, but will no doubt be rewritten, lots of, lots of times"– will be driven by this theme. "This is not about a shift to the left, it's not," he insists, but it very clearly is a more leftwing prospectus than Blair or Brown ever put to the British people. "Then let the chips fall where they may, and we'll see what people say."

Hearing Miliband using a casino metaphor is unexpected, but he is really quite the gambler. Invited to describe his "biggest idea", he says it is nothing less than to transform what he calls a "short-term, take-what-you-can, something-for-nothing" world. He continues: "We've had a series of crises over the last few years – banking, MPs' expenses, phone hacking, riots, and what I call the quiet crisis about what's happening to people in their everyday lives. They look unconnected. They're not unconnected. They're about the ethic of the way you run your society."

The country has "got to be run by a different ethic" that will usher in an age of responsibility and alter the behaviour of everyone from top to bottom of society. "It's an ambitious project," he avers. It sure is. Many politicians aspire to change their countries, some even the world, but not so many think they can alter human behaviour itself.

Given such vaulting ambition, the slogan to encapsulate it is probably bound to seem crude and cheap. The soundbite, which we'll no doubt hear a lot of at the conference in Liverpool, is "a new bargain for Britain". He produces a policy that is supposed to be an illustrative down payment. A Labour government would, he says, lower the cap on student tuition fees to £6,000, paid for by taxes on the financial sector combined with an increased contribution from higher-earning graduates. "It shows the difference that we would be making if we were in government now."

It will obviously be attractive to some people, especially students themselves. It also provides a way of illustrating "a practical difference" with the coalition and a means of saying "we are going to be the party of aspiration". But one new policy pulled out of a hat for the conference is equally obviously far from enough to fill out a manifesto.

Labour won't win back the respect of the many voters it lost at the last election unless it regains credibility on the economy and is trusted to tax and spend wisely. Miliband accepts "we've got further to go" on that. "I know Ed Balls and I have a big job in the years ahead to convince the public that it is right for them to trust us with the nation's finances and it's going to start this week. I accept that we've got a job to do convincing people." He acknowledges, too, that "there would be cuts if we were in government" and claims to remain committed to halving the deficit in four years. Challenged to come up with a list of cuts that he supports, the list is not a long one. The excuse: "We're not in government at the moment".

Labour's opinion poll position is in the low 40s. That's much better than the share of the vote it recorded at the election, though still not good enough in the estimation of some members of the shadow cabinet, one of whom, Jim Murphy, has said so publicly. Miliband doesn't agree. In fact, he claims he couldn't care less. "I don't really watch polls. My job is not to comment on polls: my job is to get our strategy right and show the country what we're about. Let the polls take care of themselves."

If it is really true that he doesn't look at the polls – which would make a very rare politician indeed – perhaps it is a good thing. For they consistently show his approval ratings badly lagging behind those of David Cameron, while focus groups persistently describe Miliband in unflattering terms such as "weird" and "geeky".

He tries to shrug that away, too. "I'm not about to change my looks. The interesting thing is you learn about yourself in this job and I'm pretty confident about myself because I know what I believe, I know what I have to do as leader, I know what it means to lead." That's a bold – some would say vain – assertion from someone who has only been doing the job for 12 months.

He couldn't care less – or so he says – about media commentary that he just doesn't come over as a plausible candidate for prime minister. "Not only do I not read the papers, I didn't even read my biography. I rather offended my biographer by telling him that. I didn't even read the [newspaper] extract."

Some think Labour's most realistic ambition at the next election is to be the largest party in another hung parliament and form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Nick Clegg seemed to slam the door on that idea when he used his conference speech to scorn the two Labour Eds as "backroom boys". Then he appeared to lock the door shut when he declared that Labour could "never, ever be trusted with the economy". After that, it is hard to conceive how the Lib Dems – certainly while Clegg was still their leader – could go into government with Labour.

Miliband is dismissive. "Look, I'm not interested in them at the moment. I'll leave Nick Clegg to his own problems. I didn't bother to watch his speech. I know you're going to think this is bad, but I actually haven't even read his speech." But he clearly has heard some of the things said by the Lib Dem leader. "He sort of wants to pretend that he is somehow holding the Tories back. He's not, he's propping them up. That's what he's doing. On the economy, he's propping them up. He's propping them up on tuition fees, he's propping them up on the NHS."

As for Cameron, what does Miliband say to those voters who think he looks impressive as a prime minister? "I think he's always been a good, an articulate, salesman for what he sells. The problem is he's just wrong on the major judgments. Some people say he doesn't believe in anything. I don't think that's quite right. We saw a massive failure of free-market economics, but his answer is more of the same. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming to banking reform." Cameron, he says, leads "a government that says we're going to cut childcare help [for women who want to go out to work], but we are straining at the leash to cut the 50p tax rate. That doesn't suggest somebody who is a compassionate Conservative."

In a year in what some regard as the toughest job in politics, what has been Miliband's most thrilling week? "Having my second son and getting married," he says, a response we ought to have anticipated. "I'm not going to say the operation on my nose."

Ah yes, the famous nose job. Has the operation on his adenoids been a success? "I think it's worked, even if you don't." So is it helping him – and his wife – to get more sleep?

"It's gone down well at home, yeah." No more snoring, then? "I think that's enough information actually." About that, he is right.
Guardian