Ed Miliband returns to the politics of the Seventies At his party conference in Brighton, Mr Miliband delivered a speech of extreme technical skill, reciting more than an hour's worth of material without recourse to notes. Yet over its span, it became clear that his apparently off-the-cuff claim this week to be bringing socialism back to Britain was no idle boast. His agenda is to turn the clock back not to the Brown years, but to the era of Wilson, Callaghan and Foot. If that sounds hyperbolic, consider the speech's contents. Mr Miliband succinctly outlined many of the problems this country faces. Wages, he said, are lagging behind prices. More broadly, for all the talk of recovery, "that vital link between the growing wealth of the country and your family finances" - the feeling that you have a good pension, and a good job, and your children will have better ones - has been broken. In one of the speech's better lines, he observed that a rising tide "just seems to lift the yachts." But what was Mr Miliband's solution to this, or the lack of new housing, or the pressure put on household finances by high energy prices? Put simply, state intervention. The Labour leader did not entirely play up to the "Red Ed" caricature - for now, the only thing his party promises to "renationalise" is the NHS, in an attempt to rid the health service of competition and choice. But where he did outline specific policies, they invariably had the smack of over-mighty government. On housing, for example, the state will be able to build new towns where ministers see fit. Meanwhile, developers who do not provide enough housing will have their sites taken away: "either use the land or lose the land," said Mr Miliband, sternly. In other words, Labour is saying that it will confiscate private property if it does not like what people are doing with it. Then there is the plan to freeze energy prices for two years, which seeks to address market failure via the imposition of price controls. This deserves examination, because it is flawed in practically every detail, to the point where it is almost a blueprint for blackouts. Yes, there is a problem with energy bills - which is why this newspaper has called on the Government to break up the cosy cartels and introduce real competition. But at the same time, gas and electricity costs are largely dictated by global wholesale prices. What will Mr Miliband do if these rise? Have the Exchequer shoulder the cost, and send the deficit soaring? Prices are also high due to the carbon levies imposed by the first secretary of state for energy and climate change - one Ed Miliband. Not only did he fail to crack down on, or even mention, the market abuses he now decries, but his party's years of dithering left us with a potentially crippling lack of generating capacity over the coming years. Yet how to persuade the energy companies to invest the tens of billions of pounds required for a new generation of power stations if they cannot make a profit? What happens to the tax revenues that these companies used to generate for the Exchequer if their income is capped and investments abandoned? And if we are freezing gas bills, why not the price of a gallon of petrol, or a broadband contract, or a can of beans at Tesco? Such populist stuff may play well on the doorstep. But it is the politics not of Mr Miliband's childhood in the Eighties, but the Seventies. Of course, the applause in the hall suggested that Labour members are not unduly troubled by that: this was a dose of the old religion, for which they have been hankering for years. But what was as significant as what was said was what was unsaid. Mr Miliband offered nothing on the deficit, or fiscal discipline, or welfare reform, or Europe, or the need to raise educational standards to compete with the best in the world. His comforting, illusory promise is that as prime minister he would be able to make the modern world go away, and restore a lost era of good jobs and high wages through the miracle of state intervention. But we have played this tape before, and we know how it ends. Yesterday, Mr Miliband offered one constant refrain: "Britain can do better." With Labour in charge, it is difficult to see how.