Labour must be the party of national recovery

“Decency. Principle. Values.” Can Labour’s election campaign recover from the damaging revelations about the ideas which sustain Ed Miliband? For all the fun to be had holding Miliband’s speaking notes up to the light, nothing embarrassing was found. On the contrary, the pages revealed a thoughtful and serious person getting ready to make as many telling points as possible on the national stage.

Miliband’s personal ratings have risen considerably the more the public has seen of him, especially when Fleet Street’s finest have been cut out of the picture. This is why, no matter how tricky the five-way April 16debate might be, Miliband is right to take part. Ready to face Putin but not Leanne Wood? He has to grab every moment like this he can between now and May 7.

Entering the final month of the long election campaign the two main parties appear to be more or less level in the polls. Aggregate national data on voting intentions now hide as much as they reveal: the battle comes down, as it always does, to key seats, and undecided voters in those seats. (Scotland is another dramatic story all of its own.)

But one much-predicted, promised phenomenon has not yet appeared: the permanent and decisive “crossover” in the polls, pointing to what some have billed as an inevitable Conservative victory. Economic recovery has not brought about recovery in levels of Conservative support.

Why is this? Petrol is cheaper, there’s a supermarket price war on, inflation is subdued, and wages for some have finally started to rise a little. This should be a powerful cocktail for Tory hopes. But there is no spike, barely even a blip, in the blue team’s score. Labour spokespeople will tell you that average families are £1,100 a year worse off after five years of Tory-led government. But voting intentions are often shaped by economic circumstances in the run-up to polling day, not by the memory of cuts from three years earlier. Yet better economic news today is not shifting people. Something bigger must be going on.

This may be, technically, an economic recovery. But it is not a national recovery. There is no significant recovery in morale, in well-being, in optimism. People are not happier. They are more worried, and less certain about their future and the future that lies in wait for their children. A YouGov survey in January this year for BBC Radio 4 found that 55% of people thought that, on the whole, their family life was getting worse. Only 7% thought it was getting better. This may in part explain why David Cameron’s smooth words about recovery, and George Osborne’s bumptious claims on the economy, are proving unpersuasive. (It also explains why Cameron’s slightly desperate plea to Ukippers to “come home” is unlikely to succeed: Ukip supporters see no signs of recovery, are very pessimistic about the future, and don’t see the Tories as “home” anyway…)

Here is Labour’s opportunity in these final four weeks. They should position themselves as the party of national recovery. That means the building of a better kind of economy, with better jobs, higher productivity and higher wages. New Labour congratulated itself for “getting” aspiration. But aspiration simply for more consumer goods and a better “lifestyle” proved to be a dead end. Even now, the government’s claims about continued economic recovery rest on household debt returning to unsustainably high levels – 182% of disposable income by 2019, above the pre-crisis peak (2008) of 169%. This is no economic transformation or meaningful recovery at all, merely a reflating of the debt bubble.

Labour’s aspiration – a worthwhile aspiration – should be for a sustainable national recovery, for greater quality of life, not merely higher domestic consumption. The policies on housing, on raising low pay, on better childcare – these are the interventions that will make people’s lives a bit better. That is how you start to build a better country. That is the story to offer voters in the next four weeks.