ED MILIBAND’S declaration of a Labour Party “summer offensive” is timely — but he must urgently flesh out the soundbites of yesterday’s speech with a radical agenda for Britain.

As Unite general secretary Len McCluskey points out in relation to the minuscule rise in GDP being crowed about by Tory ministers, “working people are doing the heavy lifting” in this country.

The much-touted “recovery” — which sees GDP per capita 6 per cent lower than in 2008, the year the bankers crashed the economy — is a win for the super-rich elite on the backs of the working class.

Profits are being racked up by fat cat corporations — which are still sitting on hundreds of billions in capital they refuse to invest — at the expense of working people.

Years of pay freezes and below-inflation rises have seen real-terms wages fall by thousands of pounds a year.

Outsourcing of public services to dodgy private firms has allowed bosses to arbitrarily force pay cuts and attacks on terms and conditions on workforces — as in Doncaster, where staff previously employed directly by the NHS to care for people with learning difficulties or mental health issues were told to take hits of up to £7,000 a year.

Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been shed — not just by the public sector but by banks and other corporations. RBS’s job-slashing announcement yesterday, as it posted booming profits, is part of a wider trend.

Where new jobs have replaced old, as McCluskey warns, they are on lower wages and more insecure contracts — the ballooning zero-hours epidemic shows no sign of abating despite noisy denunciations in Parliament.

And the collapse in people’s incomes has taken place alongside soaring prices for all sorts of essentials, from food to fuel.

Miliband knows this. The cost of living crisis has been Labour’s most consistent theme for over a year.

But he is still giving out mixed messages on how Labour would tackle it.

The “consistency of purpose” he flagged up yesterday has been sorely lacking from a party that condemns Con-Dem bullying but refuses to stand with workers striking to save their pay and pensions.

It is “far easier to stand up to the weak than the strong,” Miliband noted. He’d know, since his party — with a handful of honourable exceptions — shamefully backed the draconian welfare cap, an attack on some of Britain’s most vulnerable people.

The leader who informs us that “listening is an essential part of leading” has not listened to the outrage over the ruinously expensive rip-off of rail privatisation or to the repeated polls showing renationalisation would command the support of over three-quarters of the population.

Miliband is right to reject the politics of spin and personality contests. 

But Labour’s consistent poll lead over the Tories is not too small because people think he is “weird” or can’t eat a sandwich properly.

It is too small because for all Miliband’s guff people are still confused about what Labour stands for. 

Will it end the era of austerity, or stick to Tory spending plans? Will it reject and reverse the rampant privatisation of our public assets, or continue it? Will it live up to its name and be the voice and weapon of the working class, or continue to pander to big business and City spivs?

Few people will be talking about responsible capitalism on the doorstep, Miliband admits.

Not because it’s “geek-speak,” but because it’s an oxymoron. People don’t want to tweak the system which has let all of us down.

They want an alternative. Miliband has work to do if he is to provide one.