by Chris Hunter

chunter@thekmgroup.co.uk

Labour leader Ed Miliband began his speech at Gillingham on a chilly Saturday morning by joking there was no north-south divide when it came to the weather.
That may be the case, but the cold hard fact facing Labour in Kent is the party has no footing here at all, having been frozen out completely in the last general election.

Speaking to Labour's National Policy Forum at Gillingham Football Club's Priestfield Stadium, the Labour leader attempted to blast those chilling facts with wave of warm optimism and a call to "take back" the term "Big Society" from David Cameron.

He said 43,000 new members had joined the Labour Party since the general election - a trend which reflected anger over "broken promises" and "arrogance" of the coalition government.

And he went onto attack Cameron for an "old fashioned" view of society.

He said: "Now it sticks in our throat when David Cameron tries to claim he’s the man for the big society because he has an old fashioned view about the big society. His is essentially a view that says look, if government gets out of the way then society will prosper. None of us believe that."

He accused David Cameron's party of offering nothing more than "austerity and pessimism" and told members they must be "the idealists" to help bridge a gap between British people and their aspirations - a gap he accused the coalition of widening.

"If you think about New Labour before 1997 and after, we became the vehicle for people’s hopes and aspirations. That’s what I am talking about. That’s what we’ve got to do again.

"We are the idealists and the optimists," he added. "That is what gets us up in the morning, that is what motivates us as people."

Tracey Crouch, Conservative MP for Chatham and Aylesford, said in a statement: “Local people felt very let down by Labour at the last election but since it was Ed Miliband who wrote Labour’s election manifesto, the party clearly lost its way while he was reading the map.

"Until he stops dithering and starts coming up with credible policies on how to rescue this country from the mess Labour left it in then local people won’t start taking him or his party seriously”.

• Read more on Ed Miliband's trip to Priestfield inMonday's Medway Messenger.