So what’s new? This is yet another article about Labour and welfare. George Osborne wanted a debate about welfare, but he wants people to be united against ‘shirkers’ staying in bed while good citizens go out-to-work.

I don’t want even to go into that tired debate about working tax credits, and how the people Osborne appears to be targeting are low earners in society. I don’t wish to go into the billions of other arguments concerning this huge part of the budget, for example whether the “millionaire’s tax” would have ‘covered the costs’ of the “bedroom tax”. But increasingly I sense an overwhelming impression from Labour members like me an engulfing sense of despair. This is not about the top 15 things that Labour has promised to repeal or enact on gaining ‘power’, although virtually all of that list has to be cautioned against the state of the economy that any government will inherit in 2015. There are certainly too many variables and unpredictable externalities on the horizon, which makelife difficult. Labour is undergoing a complex review, and indeed people can contribute to the policy discussion through their website. However, there is simply a sense that the Labour Party has lost its identity, and that many people would simply like to quit and “up sticks”. Much of this is that Labour sets out to be a social democratic party, not a socialist party, so therefore has a real ideological problem with saving failing hospitals in the NHS; it paradoxically does not appear to have a problem in saving banks, increasing the deficit, creating billions of bonuses for some bankers in the cities. It engaged in ‘buy now, pay later’ behaviour which meant NHS hospitals, in the name of public infrastructure investment, being put on commercially-confidential contracts lasting decades at interest rates which most agree are competitive.

Labour’s fundamental problem is that it has fallen into the ‘bear trap’ of following not leading. 62% of people think that spending is too high, and indeed Philip Gould, Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson are reputed to be fond of ‘focus groups’. However, 99% of Sun voters are reputed to ‘back the Death Penalty’, and no-one is seriously proposing that Ed Miliband should ‘back the penalty’ to get elected. There is a sense that Ed Miliband will jump on any fast bandwagon going, but to give him some credit he has in fact caught a national mood over certain issues such as press regulation. However, many Labour voters feel that Ed Miliband does not share this passion over certain key issues.

Ed Miliband exhibits ‘a stuck gramophone syndrome’ when speaking about “vested interests”, which appears to be Miliband’s contorted way of reassuring the public that the Unions are not round for ‘beer and sandwiches’ every other day. But Ed Miliband simply has to emphasise, as he has tried to do to some extent, that it is the members of the Unions who, uptil now, have backed him not “the Unions” as neolithic organisations per se. Miliband has failed to make clear the essential democratic nature of the Unions, and if he has any sense of history of the Labour Party (which he does), he will wish to emphasise this. If he wishes to make the party wholeheartedly social democratic, he will not care. Surely members of Unions, such as “hard-working” (to use that tired word) nurses and teachers, will wish to have an input into nursing and teaching policy as much as private equity companies who are literally lobbying behind close doors on education and teaching policy? Labour is caught in a trap of advancing neoliberal policies of setting off hospitals against hospitals and schools versus schools, so has totally lost sight of its socialist sense of solidarity. It is currently, on welfare, allowing the debate to be ensnared and enmeshed into a discussion over ‘lazy shirkers’, and one person with 17 children setting fire to his house, but do not wish to establish basic truths about welfare for disabled citizens: that is, the living and mobility components of the current ‘disability living allowance’ do not constitute an employment benefit, but are there to help to allow disabled citizens cope with the demands in life: to use wonk speak, “to allow them to lead productive lives”.

Ed Miliband is also following not leading on the economy. The semantics of whether we should analyse the nature of the boom-bust cycle as FA Hayek would have wished us to do rather than the drawbacks of Lord Keynes’ “paradox of thrift” do not concern the vast majority of voters. However, workers who are being paid pittance, and certainly those below the statutory minimum wage, do not hear Labour screaming out from the rooftops about this achievement, which even happens to be an achievement of a Blair government. Ed Miliband has somehow managed to screw up discussions of ‘a living wage’, not in terms of allowing living standards for workers and employees, but through a convoluted discussion of ‘pre-distribution’ and the academic career of Prof Joseph Hacker (called Mr Hacker by David Cameron in ‘Prime Minister’s Questions’). Workers and employees are concerned that they can be ‘hired and fired’ below the minimum length of service (which this Government is set on reducing anyway), and that any awards for unfair dismissal will be less in future. Voters want some sort of protection through the policies of a Labour government, to curb the excesses of multi-national corporates for example, not a protracted list they can retweet at length on Twitter of the top 15 things Labour would repeal in 2015. This is basic stuff, and it is galling of a Labour opposition not even to do their fundamental job of opposing. Virtually everyone agrees that a strong opposition is essential for English parliamentary democracy.

Labour simply exudes the impression of a political party that has lost its direction, will say or do anything to get into power (while spouting platitudes such as ‘we don’t want to overpromise and under-deliver’), and is totally cautious about what offerings it possibly can supply to the general public in future. Nobody is expecting them to have a detailed manifesto, but a sense of the ‘direction of travel’, in other words people saying that disability living allowance is not an employment benefit, or that Labour would seek to curb his ‘hire-and-fire culture’ and discuss with the Unions how to go about this, would help enormously. Another critical problem is presented by the sentiment conveyed in Adnan Al-Daini’s tweet this afternoon: “If the #Labour party is going to mimic the Tory party at every step what is the point of it? Same policies different rhetoric! #hypocrisy”. Labour, at an increasing number of junctures it seems, appears to be quite unable of opposing convincingly because of its past. I am the first person to promote rehabilitation, but this is genuinely a problem now. It is claimed that Labour introduced the equivalent of the “bedroom tax” for the private sector, so themselves should not be aghast that this has been proposed on an ‘equal playing field basis’. I happen to oppose strongly the “bedroom tax”, as it appears to discriminate against sections of the population, such as disabled citizens. The NHS is another fiasco. Labour ‘as the party of the NHS’ can offer to repeal the Health and Social Care Act (2012), but this is a symbolic (and rather vacuous) promise. The problem with Foundation Trusts still in a ‘failure regime’ will exist, the issue of hospitals paying off their PFI loans on an annual basis will still exist, and it was Labour themselves who legislated for an Act of parliament managing procurement (the Public Contracts Regulations Act); through a long series of complex cases, NHS hospitals have become enmeshed in EU competition law, but Labour had, whether it likes it or not, set in motion a direction of travel where hospitals would be caught in the ‘economic activity’ and competition law axis of the EU.

What Labour obviously did not legislate for was to allow up to 49% of income of hospitals to come from private sources, nor to make the legislative landscape most amenable for private providers to enter with the lowest barriers-to-entry; it was a policy decision of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats not to give the NHS any unfair ‘protection’, meaning that the NHS would of course be expected not to provide anywhere near a universal, comprehensive service. However, as the marketisation of the NHS and privatisation has been accelerated, but one in which Labour to a much lesser degree did participate, it is hard for Labour to provide convincingly a narrative on what it wants to do next. Labour seem very eager to produce apologies at the drop-of-a-hat, such as on immigration (which came to a head with the Gillian Duffy altercation after Gordon Brown forgot to remove his clip-on microphone and Sky happened to take a recording of it). It has tried to apologise for the emergency spending on the banks during the global financial crisis, but experts are far from convinced about why the banks were not allowed to fail; it is an inherent paradox in the Labour narrative that it seems content with allowing NHS hospitals to fail, but seems reluctant to allow banks to fail (meaning shareholders and directors of banks can be rewarded, and Labour gets blamed for the exploding deficit).

Against the backdrop of a false security of poll leads perhaps, Labour’s performance is floundering because it just appears to be opposing for the sake of it; it is now a rational accusation of the Coalition to say that Labour opposes virtually everything (except for Workfare and the “benefits cap” perhaps), but does not appear to have constructive policies of its own. Despite its rhetoric on “vested interests”, it seems perfectly happy to honour the contracts it started with ATOS over the disastrous outsourcing of welfare benefits (which has seen 40% of some benefits overturned on appeal, and some claimants reported to have suffered psychological distress through the benefits application process), yet, apart from a handful of excellent MPs such as Michael Meacher, seems rather limp at criticising this particular ‘vested interest’. It is a problem when the public perception of Labour protecting multi-national vested interests overrides its ‘loyalty’ to the Unions. It is also a problem when two years into the leadership of Ed Miliband the media are unable to report the closure of law centres or the problems of the NHS privatisation process but can only report how to self-litigate and what to expect from your GP in this new NHS landscape. Ed Miliband’s fundamental problem is that he gives the impression of being a follower not a leader. Miliband appears like a TV newsreader, nicely a product of “make up”, but whose autocue is suffering a technical fault. Labour does not currently inspire confidence. If it is the case where the best Labour voters can hope for is a ‘hung parliament’, despite glaring incidents of an #omnishambles government, something is very wrong indeed.