The new leader’s address to party conference was, perhaps, rather too concerned with playing to what he perceived to be the attitudes of party members in the hall than the concerns of the country at large. If this was his strategy, it was a mistaken one: let’s not forget that 54 per cent of party members backed the progressive and reformist agenda on which his brother ran for the leadership.

Nonetheless, in his speech Miliband appeared to be moving towards a more intelligent and constructive critique of New Labour than some of his campaign rhetoric at times suggested. As he argued, New Labour is at its best when challenging the conventional wisdom, when it is ‘reforming, restless and radical’. This entirely reflects our belief that New Labour is less a set of policy prescriptions or programmes, and more a set of principles rooted in the party’s Croslandite tradition.

That is why Miliband’s decision to launch a review of party policy under Liam Byrne is the right one. Byrne’s wish to focus much of his attention on the ‘squeezed middle classes’ is an important indication that Miliband will go all-out to win back those crucial seats in the south and Midlands, with their high concentration of C1 and C2 voters, that Labour needs to form the next government.

With the review under way, Miliband should follow the examples of Tony Blair and David Cameron as leaders of the opposition, and introduce himself to the public, not in a blizzard of policy announcements, but by using a limited number of symbolic policy choices to underline the values that will animate his leadership.

Some decisions, of course, cannot wait for the outcome of reviews, as the party’s response to George Osborne’s spending review demonstrated. In his first outing as shadow chancellor, Johnson put in a bravura Commons performance. But, reflecting the party’s wider indecision about how to reduce the deficit, it was one that scored higher on style than it did on substance.

Regaining Labour’s economic credibility must now be Miliband’s top priority. This requires three things.

First, in part thanks to the prolonged leadership election, Labour has allowed the coalition free rein to peddle the myth that the deficit was the result of the party’s profligacy in government rather than the inevitable consequence of the actions it needed to take to prevent recession turning into depression. Since his appointment, Johnson has thankfully begun to nail the coalition’s great deceit, but it will take a sustained campaign to reverse the public perception that the responsibility for the cuts rests with the last government.

Second, polls show that the public not only blame Labour for the cuts, they also believe that it has no alternative strategy. This has been the great weakness of the party’s post-spending review performance. Only by making clear what its priorities are, and where it would choose not to spend money, will Labour begin to recover its credibility. This will require, at times, saying some things the unions may not like, and it may require eschewing some easy political hits. Might, for instance, Labour have been better arguing that child benefit should be taxed, rather than simply opposing the coalition’s cack-handed decision to withdraw it from all higher-rate taxpayers?

Finally, Labour is right to insist that, in the interests of maintaining the fragile recovery, the deficit needs to be cut less sharply and more slowly than Osborne proposes. There will, therefore, be cuts that it can credibly oppose. However, it should be careful to frame its opposition within the context of a set of wider values. Given his positive comments about early New Labour, Miliband might reflect that some of its more popular mantras may be the best way to signal why it is opposing some of the choices the coalition has made.

Labour should, for instance, oppose the restrictions on the working tax credit and the reductions in the childcare element of it on the basis that the party believes in ‘making work pay’ and that these cuts will have precisely the opposite effect. The childcare cut, in particular, will penalise low-income working mothers who are doing the right thing and whom government should be doing most to protect.

Similarly, what better way to resurrect the argument about ‘rights and responsibilities’ than by comparing the soft-glove treatment received by the banks with the decision to put time-limits on the contributory element of the employment support allowance? And how can the coalition have any credibility as a ‘tough on crime’ government if it is willing to preside over the loss of hundreds of police officers from Britain’s streets?

No-one, of course, is asking Labour to present a John Smith-style shadow budget four years ahead of the next election. But it’s going to have to provide much more detail on its approach to cutting the deficit than has thus far been forthcoming.

Photo: labour.org.uk