He intends to link his own life experiences (known in the trade as his ‘backstory’) with Labour’s historic mission to unlock the full potential of every human by removing the barriers to their advancement.

In May last year during the leadership contest I wrote in my Progress column:

I want immigration to be a major issue in the Labour leadership debates, not least because the only two nominated candidates on the ballot paper, as things stand, are the sons of immigrants. As it happens, being brothers, they are sons of the same immigrants. Ralph Miliband fled from Nazi Europe with his father Samuel in 1940. On arriving in London as a refugee, he started a furniture removal business, went to the London School of Economics, and became a Marxist (swearing an oath of loyalty at Marx’s grave in Highgate). Like many student Marxists, he became active in the student union. Unlike most student Marxists, his university career was interrupted by service in the Royal Navy. One or other of his sons will probably be leader of the Labour party by the autumn, and quite possibly prime minister.

If Ralph had kept going, like thousands of other European Jews, and ended up in New York, Ed and David would be running to be president of the United States. The US media would love it – brothers in rivalry for the job of leader of the free world, just like the Kennedys. And in America, their ‘backstory’ – their father a penniless immigrant fleeing the Nazis – would be considered a priceless electoral asset. They would embody the American Dream.

There is no ‘British Dream.’ The achievements of immigrants to Britain in building new lives, creating successful businesses, and contributing to the wellbeing of the nation is not celebrated. One question for the leadership candidates might be: why not? After all, aspiration is a core British value: the desire for your children to do better than you did, to enjoy opportunities and experiences, as well as material security.

Today, Ed Miliband will pick up this theme, and make it a central part of Labour’s pitch. He’ll talk about a ‘British dream’ in which parents want their children to do better than they did. Crucially, he’ll warn that for the first time in decades the assumption of progress generation to generation might be false. A generation given free higher education, booming property prices, and the security of a welfare state is no longer able to guarantee the same platform to their children. The age of aspiration has been replaced with an age of anxiety, where parents fear for their children’s future. These fears are genuine. They don’t have to be the kinds of fears experienced by regular readers of the Daily Mail or the people who caused the police website to crash yesterday. There is a genuine anxiety among parents about the future of the universities, the NHS, local nurseries, libraries, charities and opportunities for work for their children. Thousands of concerned parents will turn out in tomorrow’s day of action in defence of local libraries. Thousands more will campaign against the closure of their sure starts, swimming pools or museums. If Labour can knit these disparate campaigns into a broader understanding that without a strong society, comprising a thousand and one smaller groups, institutions and networks, the individual, no matter how loved, talented and motivated, will not prosper.

There is a growing sense that the government’s programme of cuts has less to do with the deficit, and more to do with a guiding vision of the state. The classical liberal view of the state, summarised in the Orange Book as ‘reducing the state’s role in the economy’, has been fused with the classical free-market conservatism, expressed by Ronald Reagan in his remark ‘man is not free unless government is limited’. At the top of government is a group of politicians with a shared economic Weltanschauung: a smaller state with fewer institutions, employees and areas of activity, fewer regulations and laws, and lower personal and business taxes. It is a vision of the pre-welfare state society and economy which created the greatest human opulence and the greatest human privations side-by-side. For every successful and enlightened entrepreneur, there were battalions of hungry little children; for every self-made man, a million for whom life was a grim, unsuccessful battle to survive.

They won’t admit it, but the kind of society and economy the Victorians created is what Liberal and Tory ministers want to recreate. It is fitting that this week we commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Robert Tressell, whose novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists exposed the tragic waste and injustice of a society driven purely by the profit motive. The government wants to turn the clock back to kind of society Tressell so acutely excoriates.

If Ed Miliband succeeds in linking personal aspiration, and the kind of ambition that drives parents to work themselves half to death to pay for piano lessons and school trips, with a vision of society where new libraries, hospitals and museums open, not close, then we may be back in the game.

Photo: Mingo Hagen