Ed Miliband

MY column in this week's newspaper is about the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, and why things are looking bleak for him. Here it is:

ED MILIBAND, leader of the opposition Labour Party, has a problem which should not be serious, but probably is. In this buffed and burnished television age, he sounds and looks a bit odd. This makes him increasingly the butt of jokes. Things are so bad that a BBC interviewer this week asked him—more or less directly—whether he was too ugly to be prime minister.

There is not much that Mr Miliband can do about his slightly prissy delivery and doleful, irregular features. In contrast another, genuinely grave, flaw is entirely his own fault. Mr Miliband’s plans for solving Britain’s most pressing problems manage to be both too timid and implausibly ambitious.

On January 10th Mr Miliband gave a speech on the economy, explaining what his party should stand for, now there is less money around. Amid horrible approval ratings (according to YouGov, a pollster, some two-thirds of voters think the Labour leader is doing a bad job) allies of Mr Miliband talked up the importance of the address. They called it a moment to “bash on the head” the idea that Labour is in denial about the need to fix the public finances.

Mr Miliband made an important concession in his speech: that Britain will probably be stuck in austerity after the next general election, planned for 2015. That means a future Labour government would not be able to reverse every spending cut made by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, he said. His Labour Party would not be able to repeat Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s strategy of letting financially turbocharged growth rip, while diverting some of the proceeds into public works and welfare. Labour would have to deliver “fairness in tough times”.

Mr Miliband and his inner circle are convinced this message resonates with the “squeezed middle”: the group that has seen its living standards stagnate while welfare recipients at the bottom of society and bankers at the top seem to have been spared pain. The Labour leader believes that he predicted the current national mood of gloom and anger. He devoted chunks of his speech to explaining just how prescient he has been.

He had been mocked when he first attacked “crony capitalism”, he declared. Now Tories and Lib Dems were scrambling to copy him. A year and a half ago, Labour warned the government about the dangers of cutting spending too far and too fast. It had been proved right, he insisted. Because too much demand has been removed from the economy, the government would have to borrow “£158 billion more” than planned over five years.

The Labour leader is fond of this last argument about missing demand, and repeats it often. But this is odd. For one thing, it is a source of public doubts about Labour’s commitment to reducing the budget deficit, a task most voters say is necessary. For another, it is a ludicrously complex line of attack. Economists disagree about the precise impact of deficit spending (and voters are just as confused, with poll numbers on whom or what to blame for Britain’s economic woes splitting every which way). Most damagingly, Mr Miliband is picking a fight about the past. He is seeking to prove, with numbers, that voters made a mistake when they trusted the coalition back in 2010. That is a strange use of an opposition leader’s time.

It is also not working. Polls show voters far more inclined to trust Mr Cameron than Mr Miliband on the economy, even if they are not sure the Tory leader is worried about fairness. Perhaps this is because, on taking office, the coalition made a much bigger and more easily understood prediction: that a terrifying economic storm was brewing, which would be made more lethal by Labour’s failure to put money aside in good times.

Mr Miliband claims to “relish” the chance to manage the economy differently. But when it comes to embracing austerity, he could hardly sound more grudging. In his speech he did not admit to a penny of wasted spending in 13 years of Labour rule. He offered a single example of spending he might trim, and vowed to offset that with compensation from the private sector. In office, he explained, Labour might not be able to increase the winter-fuel allowance (a universal benefit paid to elderly dukes as well as retired dustmen). To offset that pain, he would push energy companies to offer their cheapest fuel tariffs to the elderly.

The quiet man

What changes does Mr Miliband relish, then? The answer lies in his talk of breaking with New Labour’s economic model. Yes, he says, he is “incredibly proud” of schools and hospitals paid for with the proceeds of growth, and the jobs created under Mr Blair and Mr Brown. But too many of those jobs offered low-paid, low-skilled drudgery. Mr Miliband wants to use “the power of government” in new ways. He vows to harness regulations, tax rules and government procurement contracts to craft a kinder, more sustainable version of capitalism with a marked Rhineland tinge: think apprentices, employee representatives helping to set bosses’ pay, and a Britain in which smart graduates want to design clever machines, not City derivatives.

These are bold plans, at a time when governments worldwide are struggling to survive until next month. Mr Miliband is serenely confident. These are early days, he says. The government is failing. Voters will come round.

Voters’ trust in the government could crumble. But Mr Miliband may not have much time. Grumbling from Labour MPs is turning into on-the-record sniping. Timidity about how to cut spending is less of a problem than their leader’s vaulting ambitions to reshape British capitalism, just when voters have lost faith in the ability of experts of all sorts to improve anything. Mr Miliband is a mid-sized politician making outlandish claims. That credibility gap explains why voters are not listening.