Apparently one of the things which Enoch Powell, the late Conservative MP, use to rail against was the idea of inevitability. Tony Benn, in the trailer for his new film, said that he became disillusioned with politics when he realised that ‘all politicians wanted to do was to do things better’. Benn said that he wanted to change things, even if that made him unpopular.

Change is of course a hugely powerful force in politics. David Cameron used to some effect, though not enough to win the 2010 general election, with his slogan, “We can’t go on like this.” Ed Miliband revamped the theme in this 2013 party Conference speech with the mantra, “Britain deserves better than this.”

Ed Miliband curiously decided not to bring up two legal defeats for the Coalition yesterday. It might have been ‘low hanging fruit’ to mention that the Secretary for State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, MP had lost in the Court of Appeal over the legal point about whether he acted with sufficient authority to sign off the Lewisham reconfiguration.

Or it might have been equally easy to pick on Iain Duncan-Smith’s defeat in the Supreme Court over the legality of his workfare scheme. The Department of Work and Pensions had utterly ruthlessly spun this as a victory for the Government, even they lost on all of the legal points save for whether the scheme had constituted ‘forced labour’.

It might be that Ed Miliband doesn’t feel particularly confident about matters of social justice, where it could be argued that traces of Labour policy ‘meat’ can be found in the Coalition’s policy of workfare and NHS reconfigurations.

Ed Miliband seems equally undeterred about the fact that it was Labour who contracted the market from fourteen to six, and reconfigured the market such that the generation and supply divisions were best set up to fleece the customer. Labour also helped to establish the market in the NHS, promoting its policy of ‘independent sector treatment centres’.

That Labour has rejected socialism is an easy criticism to make. Labour has been accused of ‘price fixing’ amongst the barrage of criticisms of its ‘price freeze’. However, whenever the State manipulates prices, libertarians and admirers of Frederick Hayek smell blood. They liken it to how the U.S. fixed ‘interest rates’, creating a perfect storm for the global financial crash of 2008. Therefore, the argument gets wheeled out that it is not the free market itself that is dangerous, but the State’s attempts to fiddle it.

This leaves Labour’s health policy still rather precarious. The fingerprints of ‘payment-by-results’ are all over New Labour. This is another prime example of the State wishing to interfere with the behaviour of professionals, turning patients into consumers, and Doctors into bean-counters. With the perpetuation of ‘NHS preferred provider’, the market will still not be abolished from the NHS, and many will think that this mission has not been accomplished.

Ed Miliband’s short term tactic therefore appears to be speaking up for the powerless, or the ‘squeezed middle’, but his long-term strategy over the extent to which he wishes to abandon the market still remains problematic.

Whilst it appears that Miliband is going to be buffeted at the last minute by unexpected unemployment or balance of payments news, as had been previously a problem for Ted Heath in his war against Harold Wilson, the good ship Miliband, many suspect, is still unable to see the hidden icebergs.