Ed Miliband could not have been clearer this morning. He believes that Gordon Brown got his presentation badly wrong but his economic policy fundamentally right.
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The Labour leader said that his predecessor should have acknowledged before the election that his plan involved spending cuts and added that it was a mistake to promise "no more boom and bust".
However, he stated that Labour had not spent too much in government - spelling out his answer to me at his last news conference.
His argument is that Britain's borrowing was manageable before the crash and only became unsustainable thanks to it - as happened all over the world. America has not got a deficit, he said, because Gordon Brown spent too much. No one can argue with that.
What some do argue is that the last Labour government had built its policy on unsustainable foundations - assuming that the City would continue to pour tax into the government's coffers while continuing to increase government spending significantly year on year.
The crash slashed tax revenues permanently while spending continued. Although there would have been a huge deficit regardless of policies prior to the crash, say the critics, it would have required a less painful correction if tax and spending plans had not been on an unsustainable path.
Ed Miliband has decided that apologising for spending too much is not the way to deal with what Gordon Brown saw as Labour's "spending problem" when he was in opposition.
Brown believed that voters feared big tax rises under Labour because they did not believe the party could control spending. He set out to prove that they were wrong and in so doing earned the title "The Iron Chancellor".
His prot�g� will now have to find his own way to counter Tory charges that he is addicted to tax and spend.
One last thought about today's interview - put aside the policy and focus on the presentation. Ed Miliband came across as clear, confident and completely at ease with the questions he faced. Perhaps that will quieten some of his internal critics.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2011/01/ed_clear_on_gor.html
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