Ed Miliband’s favourite childhood game was, famously, a Rubik’s cube. Young Miliband possessed prodigious ability with the coloured squares, twisting them hither and thither until they aligned correctly.

I was less brilliant. My preferred intellectual test was Master Mind. Despite the title it was a less impressive endeavour. Your opponent chose a selection of coloured pins, which were hidden from view. The task was to guess not just the colours, but also the correct order. Once you had the right answers but the wrong order, you were more or less home and dry.

I was reminded of playing Master Mind listening to Ed Miliband’s speech on the deficit this morning.

All the right colours were there. The Labour leader promised credible reform to public services, meaningful devolution of power, greater efficacy in state spending, a focus on lifting skills, wages and productivity, while at the same time committing to a managed reduction in the deficit.

The trouble is I was not sure if we’ve put the colours in the right order. An outraged Labour supporter told me that we shouldn’t be ‘diet Tories’ and others worry that we are narrowing the difference with the government, which will lead to a flow of radicals to various alternatives. It is a common belief on the left that we need to inspire, with real, concrete pledges, not concede ground to the Tories by talking about the deficit.

This is a question of getting the pins in the right order, not of which pins you choose.

You want people to know the difference between a Labour government and a Tory government, of course, but first you need them to believe you can deliver what you say you want, without blowing up the economy, increasing the deficit, taxing them to high heaven.

Past Labour oppositions have promised all sorts of big goodies to the electorate but have come a cropper if they have not laid that groundwork. It is no good having lots of clear red water if voters assume it is just a sea of red ink.

So a Labour opposition has to convince voters of our credibility before we can promise change. This was the lesson Gordon Brown taught Labour in his remorseless, uncompromising fashion.

My concern is that we have spent four years promising change, and are only now worrying about whether people believe we can deliver it. As a result, talking about our fiscal believability might feels less like natural credibility, but a last minute slamming on of progressive brakes and a lowering of expectations.

The thing is, it is not like that. There is a clear difference between the Tory prospectus and Labour’s. If George Osborne delivers on his promised timescale of budget balance, the state will shrink, but in the wrong areas. To put it in sidebar of shame terms, we will have a skinny-fat state, perhaps light on the scales, but untoned, lacking in productive healthy muscle and entirely unfit for the beach. A race to the saggy bottom.

The tragedy of the last four years, as Ed Miliband said, was not that the state did not need to return to fiscal balance, but that the Tories approach the question of fiscal conservatism in an ineffective, unproductive and fundamentally wrong way. This was supposed to be a fiscal recovery powered by growth in exports, higher productivity, better skills and greater economic balance. It has been nothing of the sort, so the deficit stayed high while we have not done the investment we need to produce that economic shift in the future.

Running deficit reduction a little slower and a little more evenly allows us a little fiscal space to deliver that change. We can focus on building up the sinews of the economy, like better housing, greater skills, increased infrastructure, better technical education. That would help produce an economy that distributes better and increases the rewards for the many.  It is a huge difference in vision and approach and one that should be more than enough to inspire anyone on the left of politics.

I worry, however, that perhaps we have got our sequencing wrong. Instead of accepting the fundamental need for rebalancing, we seemed to reject it for good, even though we did nothing of the sort.  So now some will wonder why we talk about the deficit only now, while others will wonder why we are apparently trimming our ambitions to fit our budgetary cloth.

When I played Master Mind, getting your colours in order was as important as getting the colours right. I have a feeling the same is true in political strategy.

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Hopi Sen is a contributing editor to Progress

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