Ritchie offers some free advice to Ed Miliband and the Labour party on what strategy they should adopt with respect to cuts:

If the ConDems cuts deliver economic panacea nothing Labour can do will get them back into office at the next election. Period.

If those cuts do not work, as I predict, then offering more of what the ConDems offer will be no reason to chose Labour at that election. So they won’t get back into office by doing that. Period.

So the only viable option for Labour is to offer a significantly different programme. That was why Ed Miliband had to be the choice and the risk could not have been taken on David Miliband. It is also why Ed Balls will I hope be shadow chancellor.

This is a time for conviction and EM has nothing - repeat nothing - to lose by going for it. The only viable choice is saying cuts are wrong. Partly because they are. Partly because nothing else puts Labour back in office.

He's wrong.  This would be a daft strategy.  We are in this mess because Labour totally failed to manage the budget properly while in power.  They simply have no credibility with voters with respect to public finances.

To even attempt to claim that cuts are not necessary would represent a refusal to apologise for the many errors Labour made in the last 13 years.  These were rejected by voters in May, and Labour needs to move on from them if it is to be electable again. 

But their only way out is to come out and apologise for their very many mistakes.  Ed Miliband has taken the first, tentative step towards that, but he needs to so much more.  He can't just list Labour's failures and hope to move on.  Figuratively, Labour has to walk barefoot across hot coals before they can be forgiven.  And that will probably take 2-3 leaders, of which Miliband is merely the first.  Miliband wrote Labour's manifesto, so it stretches the boundaries of belief that he can do a volte-face on so many of Labour's policies.

Labour have a long road back.  But one thing's certain - if they follow Ritchie's roadmap, they'll take an awful lot longer to get there.

However, I do share with Ritchie the hope that Ed Balls will be shadow chancellor.  He will be so chronically bad at the job, it will help sustain Labour's long period in the political wilderness.

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Filed under: Politics with tags ed miliband, labour, richard murphy