After WATO: Miliband needs to be brave – and put the economy before the politics

By now, most people in the “Westminster Village” (and most people reading this site), will have heard – or heard about – Ed Miliband’s WATO interview yesterday. Most of the public will be completely oblivious of course (and won’t know what WATO is either) but that’s neither here not there. Once something starts bouncing around the Westminster echo chamber it can be hard to concentrate on anything else.

For the avoidance of doubt – it was clearly a bad interview. The tone Miliband took was wrong – it often sounded like he was raising his voice – but much of that was due to him doing the interview “down the line” from another location. It’s much harder to get an interview like that right if you can’t look the interviewer in the eye, and you’re much more likely to interrupt or talk over the other speaker too.

However, the tone, whilst uncomfortable, wasn’t the real problem with the interview – the problem was the substance.

Today’s ComRes poll for the Independent shows that 58% of the public – a clear majority – believe that Tory austerity has failed. If Ed Miliband and Ed Balls believe that they have a credible alternative to austerity, then now would be a good time to make the case for it.

And yet when Miliband was questioned by Martha Kearney yesterday on borrowing, he contorted and obfuscated in an attempt to avoid saying that he would borrow more than the Tories (although as Hopi Sen has noted, there’s a vast difference between what the Tories say they’d borrow and what they actually borrow). Evidently Miliband and his team had agreed that Ed should not say that Labour will borrow more. That is clearly “the line”. But unfortunately it’s also untrue. If your critique of the Tories is that they are cutting too far and too fast – and that they are sucking demand out of the economy with their cuts – the only logical solution is to argue that Labour would borrow more in the short term to stimulate growth, especially if you’re advocating a cut in VAT.

The fear for Miliband is, of course, that the Tories will use any argument for more borrowing as proof of Labour’s profligacy and inability to run the economy. But even the deficit hawks of In The Black Labour advocate higher spending now to boost the economy. To all but the most hardened anti-statists such an argument is a no-brainer, especially now one of the key academic tenets of the austerity myth has been blown out of the water.

Miliband needs to rid himself of the fear of Tory attacks and say what he actually thinks is the right thing to do for the economy, and then decide how the politics works to explain that – not the other way round. That will require bravery, the ability to challenge the prevailing media consensus and a need to appeal directly to the public.

But when Miliband has been at his best as Labour leader, those are exactly the things he has done…

Update: Ed Miliband did tell Daybreak this morning:

“I’m clear about this, a temporary cut in VAT – as we’re proposing – would lead to a temporary rise in borrowing; the point I was making yesterday was that if you can get growth going by cutting VAT, then, over time, you’ll see, actually, borrowing fall. That was the point I was making yesterday and it’s good to be able to make it today.”

But although he says he’s “clear” about this, he wasn’t clear on it in yesterday’s interview. And so far, the case for borrowing is still limited to borrowing for a VAT cut.