observer / mr miliband

100 days in, Mr Miliband, you need a plan

It's time the Labour leader explained what he believes in

• Editorial

• The Observer, Sunday 2 January 2011

• Article history

Tony Blair liked to quip that the difference between opposition and government was that in the former he woke each morning and asked himself what to say and in the latter it was what he'd do. The transition is just as difficult in reverse. After the privileges of office, former Labour ministers have to master the peculiar art of shadowing power.

For Ed Miliband, who marks his 100th day as party leader on Tuesday, the learning curve has been especially steep. He started last summer's contest as a relative outsider. He won by the narrowest of margins, a sliver of second preferences among trade union members who, thanks to an arcane electoral system, were able to trump the choice of Labour MPs and ordinary party members. And to make it personal, the rival from whom he snatched victory was his older brother.

Those circumstances made for a tricky launch to the new leadership. No one said politics was easy.

Sceptics inside and outside the party denied Mr Miliband the traditional honeymoon period, demanding that he immediately prove his credentials as an effective foil to the government. When the new leader took time off for paternity leave, Labour MPs and party grandees were unfairly hasty in complaining about his absence from frontline politics.

There is a palpable sense of impatience in the Labour party for Mr Miliband to land more blows on the coalition. Partly that is just the way of modern politics, with attention spans conditioned by the demands of 24-hour news. But it also expresses alarm at how radical the new government has proved to be. While Labour has been regrouping, ministers have launched massive policy campaigns on every front: a revolution in the way schools are run; a fundamental reorganisation of the NHS; a systematic revision of all aspects of the welfare state. And all of it amid the biggest fiscal retrenchment in living memory.

It is not a partisan observation to say that such a vast programme could benefit from probing by a well-organised opposition. So far Mr Miliband's record is patchy. He has bested David Cameron in some of their weekly Commons jousts and been roughed up by the prime minister once or twice too. There has been some effective harrying of other ministers. Education secretary Michael Gove has been exposed as a taker of over-hasty decisions – on cuts to school sport funding, for example – and, thanks in part to Labour pressure, forced to back down. U-turns have been forced elsewhere around the margins of the government's programme. But the coalition's capacity to make tactical retreats is a potential source of strength, suggesting flexibility to voters without, in fact, ceding an inch on the fundamental economic decision to press ahead with maximum austerity.

Mr Miliband's delay in mobilising a memorable Labour argument on the economy is the source of most unease in his own ranks. The debate is being framed on the coalition's terms, namely that the cuts are a consequence of Gordon Brown's profligacy and that the only alternative to George Osborne's plan is national bankruptcy. In fact, recession provoked by financial crisis is the main cause of the vast budget deficit; a range of different options existed for reining it in over a timetable less brutal than the one imposed by Mr Osborne. But there is enough political resonance in the charge of reckless Labour spending to give the coalition story momentum.

One of Mr Miliband's most urgent tasks is to win back some of that lost terrain. Ministers must be embarrassed out of the lazy and disingenuous habit of describing everything done in the name of austerity as unavoidable. Some cuts are indeed inevitable. But there are different ways to refashion the state in lean times and different ways to share the pain of adjustment. Mr Miliband does not need to publish detailed spending plans but he does need to transmit to the public some sense of how a fiscal settlement under Labour might feel different.

That creates another pressing task for the Labour leader. He must decide what of the last government's legacy he will jettison. He has wisely drawn a line under the Iraq war. He is also right to have moved to a more liberal position on anti-terror law. Such principled stands matter, but they swing only a few votes. More revealing will be the positions Labour takes when shadowing the big-spending departments of health, education and welfare.

A delicate balancing act is required in rejecting the coalition's charge that Labour only wasted money on public services, while recognising in some areas that throwing money at problems was simply not working any more. The current government is effectively levelling two accusations against its predecessor. First, that it was economically incompetent. And second, that its whole approach to the public sector was ineffective – relying on centrally administered programmes, targets and a proliferation of unaccountable quangos.

Mr Miliband needs a response to both charges. Quite separate from the economic argument over the deficit there is the awkward fact that Labour had run out of ideas by the end of its time in office. The money it was spending wasn't delivering enough of the social justice that the party once claimed as its governing purpose.

That failure is half-acknowledged in the setting up of a sweeping policy review. But before that process is complete there must be an interim reckoning with New Labour's legacy. The party needs to know what it is campaigning to preserve as well as what to change.

Mr Miliband will himself spend his 100th day in the job campaigning to help Labour retain the marginal seat of Oldham and Saddleworth in a byelection. Inevitably, the contest is being held up as a test of progress against the coalition.

Labour's eviction from power is too recent to expect the party to start looking like a fresh alternative government. That is a long-haul project. But it starts with a clear account of what was right and what went wrong under New Labour. It requires also an account of the leader's governing principles.

After 100 days, Ed Miliband has not yet properly explained to the country as a whole who he is and what he believes. He shouldn't waste any more time.