Labour conference: building blocks

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/22/labour-conference-building-blocks

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A lot of work goes into building a house – footings and drains, dampproofing and power lines – before anything much rises about the ground. Labour's had three years working on the foundations of the Ed Miliband programme, and this week in Brighton he and his team have to get going on the structure itself. It has to have watertight credibility combined with a sense of ambition that's relevant to every potential Labour voter – and that means the squeezed middle as well as the vulnerable and hard-pressed who are most likely to gain from the proposals to repeal the bedroom tax, raise the minimum wage and act on zero-hours contracts. And the whole project will depend on the economic vision that Ed Balls sets out in his speech on Monday.

Mr Balls's task was never going to be easy. It is made rather more challenging by Damian McBride's shocking (but not very surprising) tales of the black arts at the heart of the Brown camp, where Mr Balls too was an intimate. His detractors will try to claim there are now even more reasons not to trust him. They will be quicker than ever to pounce on low-volume but persistent mutterings of tensions between him and Mr Miliband. He will have to deal with questions about it in the round of interviews that accompany major conference speeches.

Second, and in the medium term a far deeper problem, he must meet the charge that he called it wrong on the economy. Recovery is coming, confidence is returning and he has to walk the fine line between defending his case about the damage and delay caused by austerity – well illustrated by the US experience – and the fragility of the return to growth, without sounding as if he wants it all to go pear-shaped.

But if this week is to amount to a platform for the pre-election period, Mr Balls needs to do a bigger thing too. He has to begin to set out the economic underpinnings of one nation Labour. Mr Balls's critics suspect that his small-c conservative approach is ill-suited to devising the policies on rising inequality and the unbalanced economy without which the one-nation promise won't be plausible. Doing it within the coalition's own spending plans is tougher still. Any commitment has to be bold enough to convey a wider purpose, and – to avoid the fate that all but befell Mr Miliband's commitment to apprenticeships – policies must be worked up properly so they survive hostile scrutiny. No wonder Mr Balls is planning to call in the Office for Budget Responsibility.

The new politics, politics with no money, is a mammoth undertaking for a party that needs the power of the state to reduce inequality against huge demographic pressures and voter cynicism. Labour doesn't have long to show that it's up to it.

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