The drawn-out phoney war is over – here are the challenges for Miliband now

I think we can now conclude that Ed Miliband had a good Christmas break. In the first fortnight of 2015, he has seemed a different man from the uncertain figure we saw during Labour’s long and introspective Autumn.

Since New Year he has radiated a renewed sense of purpose, confidence and urgency. Where once we could expect a ‘big’ Ed speech every quarter, now they seem to be coming twice a week. The next one is this Saturday at the Fabian New Year conference in London, where he will address an audience of 1,000 activists and supporters.

The start of the ‘long’ campaign must have come as a relief to him. The drawn-out phoney war is over and real hostilities have commenced. And Ed has already had a lot to say about the choice before the country. On Saturday we can expect him to develop the story further and draw two stark dividing lines between the Labour Party and David Cameron.

The first is an argument about the positive role of Government. George Osborne’s ’35 per cent’ Autumn Statement and the NHS’s Winter Crisis almost write the script for Ed. The last two months have proved that a Labour government is essential to safeguard the NHS and the other vital public services on which we all rely. The party’s fiscal path strikes a sensible balance between deficit reduction and protection for public services: it is the Tories who are extreme.

Ed’s second dividing line will be about our economic future. The Tories believe an economic policy consists only of paying off debt and souping up house prices in the richest postcodes. They think Labour is afraid to talk about economics because the party can’t out-flank them on those terms.

But Ed isn’t afraid of talking about economics, because for him economic policy is something different. It means prosperity for everyone, whatever their background or corner of the country; it means supporting companies to adjust to fairer, more long-term business models; and above all it means hope for the next generation, in terms of skills, secure work, and a decent home.

The Fabian conference will consider these two central themes – and many more – with sessions on responsible business, the NHS, Europe, schools, the environment, inequality and social exclusion.

But the final challenge for Labour in this election year – which Ed knows he must address – is to respond to the public’s crisis of confidence in politics itself. Labour must not seek simply to survive the next few months with the aim of emerging unscathed: the least hated of the parties within a broken political system. It must lay down markers about how politics itself can change.

This Saturday’s conference will ask what that means in practice, with panel discussions on political reform, youth disillusionment and the long-term future of UKIP. And to round off the day Tristram Hunt, Janet Daly, Owen Jones and Shappi Khorsandi will debate: ‘the crisis of politics’.