Labour campaign launch: A message of hope amid Tory warnings will prove a delicate balancing act for Miliband

“Britain can do better than this.” “Britain can do better than this.” “Britain can do better than this.”

Seven times we heard the refrain in the opening two and a half minutes of Miliband’s speech – so often was it repeated that it stopped being clear if they were all clap lines or not, leading to a couple of awkward moments.

But that line, along with Labour’s official election campaign slogan “A better plan. A better future”, show that at the general election campaign launch today the Labour leader was making a pitch for the positive. All that “hopey changey stuff”, as someone once called it.

Stood at the top of The Orbit, the squiggly sculpture at London’s Olympic Park, and looking out over the capital’s skyline, Miliband spelt out yet more changes he would apply to the NHS. As we reported earlier, Labour will impose a cap on the profits that can be made by private companies from NHS contracts. Barely a day or a speech goes by now without a new policy announcement. Ed Miliband is dropping new policies more often than Bob Dylan makes albums. Long gone are those days of the “blank page”, when activists were being sent naked to the doorsteps of Britain.

Miliband seemed to brim with the enthusiasm that activists found from his performance last night. There was no “gloom” here, as he was accused of by a member of the public in yesterday’s opening exchange. No, here he was “giving hope back to young people and restoring the Promise of Britain.”

But how much of that will cut through? Can we really call this a positive campaign? Labour have launched two election posters in the last week, both brutal attacks on their opponents positions and cutting pretty close to the Tory bone (one more literally than the other, ahem). Both are classics of the political attack ad genre, and there is no room to argue they are in fact positive, in their own way.

How can Labour square this circle? How can they fight the gutter war and send out dire warning of a second Tory term while claiming the optimistic moral high ground?

My belief is that a campaign based solely on a message of hope is not a stroke of strategic genius. It is not that simple to win elections, and it is even harder to govern. Miliband needs to keep a tonal balance between the happy-clappy stuff and the Private Frazer from Dad’s Army tribute act he pulls on the NHS (“It’s doooomed!” etc). You can get away with finishing a week of attacks with a speech claiming to be the positive offer once or twice, but it’s a tough equilibrium to pull off.

As the Shadow Cabinet hopped onto Labour’s campaign battlebus to head to a marginal seat, I suddenly realised I’d not thought about the bus’ colour. It is not cerise, magenta, or pink: it is grey. No, not particularly striking, but it perhaps shows that people are thinking very hard about not making silly mistakes. At the tube station journalists were met by a smiling young Canadian man in a Labour Students cagoule, positioned there to guide the media to the right place. Little things, perhaps, but together they scream: “We are competent, honest!”

You can read the full Ed Miliband speech here.