Making the case for growth over cuts won't win Labour the next election – but failing to set out a viable alternative could lose it
The consequences of political choices take time to unfurl. What seemed dangerous at the start of a process can come to seem peripheral, while what once appeared merely maladroit rises up to become a damaging indication of a deeper malaise. Last week's TUC march will in political terms be remembered less for the appalling violence of a minority, or the policing tactics, but for what it said about Labour's uncertain message on cuts. As we wrote on Monday, it was right to join the march for the alternative – but, nearly a week on, it is all the more essential to be able to answer questions about what that alternative is. So it was disappointing yesterday that both at the launch of Labour's local election campaign and on the Radio 4 Today programme, Ed Miliband lacked an authoritative case, while his sometimes defensive manner seemed to betray uncertainty. Opposition is a tough game, hardest of all in the early years, when the government can still throw its predecessor's legacy in its face. Labour has a good case to make against economic policy that is a matter of political choice rather than financial necessity. But it is not yet underpinned by a clear and persuasive description of why, and of how it could be different.
Labour can expect handsome rewards in May's local elections, which are in seats last contested four years ago. The dismal results then precipitated Tony Blair's departure from Downing Street. But local election results, along with good opinion poll figures for the party, disguise more fundamental areas of concern. Not only is there substantial backing still for the Tory economic programme (although that may wane as the real cuts begin to bite) but Ed Miliband's personal support is, in some polls, worse than Iain Duncan Smith's at the same point in his leadership. It's not all gloom. Rebuilding Labour's economic credibility rests on two preconditions. Constructing an alternative is one. Acknowledging past mistakes is the second. It is true that though few made it at the time, there is a case against Gordon Brown's management of the Treasury. In an interview in this week's New Statesman, the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, goes a long way to accepting that there was, at least in hindsight, a structural deficit before 2008. He admits that he was wrong about light-touch City regulation; he accepts that, with employment more buoyant than he had anticipated, his anxiety about Alistair Darling's cuts in 2009 (and, more opaquely, his no-cuts leadership election position last year) were wrong. And he is clear that those who think clamping down hard on tax avoidance is a sufficient alternative to making cuts are misguided. This is an interview that jettisons some difficult baggage.
But at the moment, in campaigning terms, it remains the stuff of the small print. The message at the local election launch yesterday, like the message at last Saturday's march, is all about solidarity, being the voters' voice "in tough times". There are too many people who will treat this as political sleight of hand – people who remember all too vividly who was in power when the meltdown happened, people who want their political leaders to be straight with them. Their views might not shape the way they vote on 5 May, but voting Labour to protest at cuts forced on their local council by the coalition is not the same as being prepared to vote Labour at the next election.
This is the real challenge for Labour: no one wants their library closed or their Sure Start cut back. No one wants to see the fall in crime rates reversed. Yet most people believe, as Labour does, that some cuts are unavoidable. Between now and the next election, few will be left untouched by the impact of the coalition's deficit reduction strategy. Mr Miliband is right to warn that it might soon feel like the divisive 1980s all over again. He will not need reminding how the economic trauma of the 1980s, and Labour's struggle to develop a cogent alternative, contributed to the party's catastrophic marginalisation. He knows he has to have more to say about the economy than that what the government is doing is wrong. And he will recognise the fallacy of the argument that Labour cannot win on the economy – that if the coalition strategy works then the party's criticisms of it will harm Labour itself, and that if it fails then they are unnecessary. On the contrary, although making the economic case for prioritising growth over cuts won't win the next election, failing to set out a viable alternative could lose it.
Behind the Treasury bombast, this is beginning to look like a worried government. Reports yesterday that David Cameron is intervening to slow the pace of NHS reforms – the bill has just started on what will be a bruising passage through the Lords – follow an unusually abrasive performance at prime minister's questions. There is no time to lose.