The question Labour needs to answer: What will be your first big cut?

If Labour win next year, if we form a government, if Ed Miliband is the Prime Minister, then there will be cuts. The argument over that has long been and gone, and there is no doubt left: it will not be fun. Cuts won’t be reversed, and there will be more to come. If you want the full, grim depiction of what Labour’s first Cabinet meeting will look like, I’ll let Hopi Sen give you the nightmares.

YouGov’s latest polling finds that far more people feel that the  government’s cuts have benefited the economy rather than hindered it. What people are unhappy about, and what must surely be at least partly responsible for Labour’s slight-but-stubborn poll lead, is the way the cuts have been administered: 53% feel the cuts have been carried out unfairly. “The public” seem to be saying that they accept the need for cuts but not these cuts. It looks like it should be paradoxical, but it’s not – not quite, anyway.

There is a fine line that can be walked here, with an argument that emphasises both fairness and fiscal responsibility. Obviously, it’s not easy: if there were popular cuts to be made you can be sure the Tories would have carried them out already. But increasingly, it looks like the only way to go into the next election.

Fortunately, it is exactly the economic argument that Labour are planning to make in the run-up to May next year. We already hold good ground on one side of the argument – for the past four years we have attacked the Tories’ austerity agenda. People know that we have been against it.

While Miliband’s personal ratings generally make for depressing reading, he carries a consistently strong lead on being in touch with the concerns of ordinary people. It is a good base to build on. What we need now is a touch of honesty. “Honesty” is the other quality on which Miliband holds a lead of the other party leaders. It could be his saving grace.

We know how much damage can be caused by a politician’s honest appearance being crushed once in government: we need look no further than Nick Clegg. For Miliband, the only thing that will make the tough decisions in Number 10 any easier will be if he’s straight with us now. If he is not clear now about the cuts he plans to make, the public backlash once they are implemented could have a deeper and longer-lasting effect on the party’s image than the 1983 manifesto.

That’s if we get that far at all. As Andrew Rawnsley identified this weekend: “Labour won’t win power over the people’s money unless it is trusted with the people’s money”.

There really is little point in identifying a strategy (in this case, deficit reduction) for winning people’s confidence in your ability to handle the economy if all you then do is allude to it. Simply saying that “tough decisions” will be made won’t convince people.

We often hear about how Labour need to be bold and radical. When Miliband next makes a big policy announcement he needs to make his boldest and most radical step yet: he needs to tell us the first big cut he’s going to make.