A colossal news event doesn’t just obliterate other items from the news agenda, it seems to cast them back in time. The arguments about welfare reform that raged last week – aggravated by George Osborne’s decision to link the case of Mick Philpott, a convicted child killer who happens also to have received benefits, to the more general moral failings of the social security system - seem to have been pushed deeper into the past by the sheer volume of coverage of Margaret Thatcher's death.

The Labour Party was collectively outraged, denouncing the Chancellor’s intervention as callous and cynical. The Tories were generally glad of another opportunity to depict the opposition as hopelessly wedded to defending a profligate system that permits indolence up to the point of breeding depravity. Something approximating a Westminster consensus formed by the end of the week that Labour came off worse from the scrap (although no one in their right mind could have judged it an edifying combat). That is partly because Ed Miliband was away on holiday. Without an intervention from the leader the party’s response looked inevitably diminished. The announcement, in Sunday’s Observer, of a "new" approach to welfare that would recognize more the value of claimants’ past contributions through work, was treated dismissively as a reactive panic, although Liam Byrne, shadow work and pensions secretary, has been kicking around the idea for months.

While some MPs on the right of Labour, mindful of public contempt for the party’s supposed record of unchecked welfare spending, fretted squeamishly that by kicking back at the Tories they were marching into another Osborne trap. Meanwhile, many on the left were in despair that seemed unable to muster sufficient moral outrage to defend those – in work and out of it - who rely on state support just to get by and who are implicitly branded as corrupt layabouts by government rhetoric.

Miliband was convicted by all sides in absentia. So it might be expected that, on his return from holiday, the Labour leader would make a clear and explicit statement of his position on the subject. As it happens, he did. I was travelling with Miliband as he launched his party’s local election campaign yesterday. (Yes, I was there when the news of Thatcher’s death came in but you’ll have to wait a bit longer to read about that.) Campaigning was abandoned and not much, if anything, that happened in politics earlier in the day was noticed.

It is worth disinterring Miliband’s welfare comments, made to a live audience in Ipswich during an unscripted question and answer session. Naturally, what he said won’t satisfy everyone but it is a clearer statement of the official position than anything that emerged last week, a relatively substantial intervention and probably worth quoting in full. So here it is: