In reply to Siward:
> (In reply to estivoautumnal) He keeps wittering on about the 'cost of living crisis' as if that's something political parties can change at will.
This is the mindset of "economics by decree", so beloved of the Soviet Union. As if all you need to do for a real, intractable problem is to pass a law saying "everything will now be perfect" and it will really happen.
It also has Soviet and Stalinist overtones of demonic Kulaks (power companies) and heroic nobility (parents, who are to be supplied with every sweetie going for free - or rather paid for by somebody else). Yet the so-called "kulaks" were actually the most productive and energetic part of the Russian peasantry, those exalted by Soviet propaganda were the wasters, the drunks and the no-goods. So now, power companies produce, unsurprisingly, much needed power, while many parents produce entirely superfluous children - and then expect, or have been lead to expect, every one else to pay for them. Vilify the producers and flatter and bribe the consumers of wealth.
It was also a striking feature of the Soviet period that there was hysterical demonisation of any economic group when the terms of trade shifted somewhat against the Soviet government, then further demonisation when draconian and punitive bureaucratic action was taken, normally extra-judicially, to penalise that group leading to them, entirely predictably, stopping their economic activity that no longer gave them any return. In fact a large part of the rise in energy bills in recent years is due to the Climate Change Act with its expensive and largely ineffectual green subsidies, passed when the Energy Secretary (by all accounts an incompetent and ignorant one), was one E Milliband. The past history of energy freezes has in any case been one of control by price being replaced by control by availability, i.e. blackouts.
Milliband alternates between long periods of ineffectual dithering and short bursts of ill-considered and reckless action.
All his other recent "policies" such as the challenge to union funding of the Labour party, with automatic enrollment in a political party sometimes without even the member knowing they were enrolled, or "British apprentices for British workers" have vanished in puffs of smoke when they had even the slightest contact with reality, this one is likely to go the same way.
He has of course, while producing all these foolish and largely open-ended spending commitments, completely ignored the fact that the UK still has a massive deficit that has at best only been partly reduced and the nascent economic recovery is still fragile and can very easily be destroyed by cheap political knee-jerks. If you send thuggish grain-procurement squads going round stealing all the grain, then peasants stop planting it, the result is famine as it was in the Ukraine.