"I come from a generation that suffered school lessons in portacabins and crumbling hospitals. I tell you one thing, for the eighteen years they were in power the Tories did nothing to fix the roof when the sun was shining"
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Miliband’s line is built to make austerity feel tactile: not an abstraction of budgets and balance sheets, but rain through a bad roof, kids in portacabins, patients in decaying wards. The “generation” framing is a quiet political judo move. It borrows the moral authority usually claimed by older voters (“we had it tough”) and flips it onto younger and middle-aged Britons whose formative memories are of public services managed, at best, on the cheap.
The killer phrase is the borrowed proverb about fixing the roof when the sun is shining. It’s not merely colorful; it’s a trap. By conceding that there were “sunny” years under Conservative rule, Miliband preempts the rebuttal that Labour’s spending was reckless and forces attention onto what voters can see: infrastructure that stayed broken even when there was money and time to repair it. “For the eighteen years they were in power” compresses a complicated era (from Thatcher through Major) into a single, prosecutorial stretch of neglect, suggesting not misfortune but habit.
Subtextually, he’s arguing that decay isn’t accidental; it’s ideological. If you truly believed the state should shrink, you wouldn’t maintain it. Portacabins and crumbling hospitals become evidence of a governing philosophy that treats public assets as optional. Context matters: Miliband is speaking in the long shadow of the financial crisis, when “we can’t afford it” became reflexive. His intent is to say: you couldn’t afford not to, and you chose not to when you could.
The killer phrase is the borrowed proverb about fixing the roof when the sun is shining. It’s not merely colorful; it’s a trap. By conceding that there were “sunny” years under Conservative rule, Miliband preempts the rebuttal that Labour’s spending was reckless and forces attention onto what voters can see: infrastructure that stayed broken even when there was money and time to repair it. “For the eighteen years they were in power” compresses a complicated era (from Thatcher through Major) into a single, prosecutorial stretch of neglect, suggesting not misfortune but habit.
Subtextually, he’s arguing that decay isn’t accidental; it’s ideological. If you truly believed the state should shrink, you wouldn’t maintain it. Portacabins and crumbling hospitals become evidence of a governing philosophy that treats public assets as optional. Context matters: Miliband is speaking in the long shadow of the financial crisis, when “we can’t afford it” became reflexive. His intent is to say: you couldn’t afford not to, and you chose not to when you could.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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