Ed Miliband: The Invisible Man.

Harriet Harman told the BBC today that "a lot of people don't know Ed Miliband." As a political statement this was hardly contentious or even particularly imformative since it remains highly unlikely that any individual would be personally known to every person in the country. However it is rather peculiar that Ed is so elusive that even most Labour supporters have no idea as to who he actually is. Much of this is probably a matter of tactics - after all, why would he expose himself to scrutiny when David Cameron is making such a good job of sinking the Tories without trace all on his own? There have been a couple of disastrous attempts by Ed to introduce himself and his thinking to the British electorate. "Predistribution" wasn't a great success, but it does provide a least a glimpse of the man behind the legend. Demonstrating that he seems to understand that the present economic system is wildly unfair, it suffered from two major drawbacks - the average voter had no idea what he was talking about and neither did he. All he was trying to say is that wages are too low and that using the tax credit system to redistribute wealth is expensive for the taxpayer and very inefficient. Simples! So why didn't he just say that? The answer is that he can't because, like so many of our politicians, he doesn't speak the same language as most of the electorate. For him politics is essentially an intelectual exercise divorced from the concerns of ordinary people and he lacks the necessary vocabulary to "connect" with voters. This, under normal circumstances, would be disastrous for a political leader but, once again, David Cameron rides to the rescue. He is even further removed from ordinary people and, lacking the political intelligence to recognise this, resorts to the Tory default setting of "just do as your f**king told, you f**king pleb". To be honest I don't really need to know who Ed Miliband is, I just need to know what he's going to do to reverse the disastrous neoliberal economic experiment of the last 30 years. So give us a break Ed and explain, in simple terms, what we need to know and stuff the PR - give us something we can believe in and the rest will follow.