TODAY’S election announcement from the Labour Party deserves a very cautious welcome.

For once, the party seems focused, not on “middle England” or “swing voters,” but on winning back the hundreds of thousands of working people who have deserted it since the new Labour project began.

Ed Miliband’s call to activists to mount the biggest campaign of doorstep, community centre and workplace conversations ever conducted by a political party reflects a recognition that Labour needs to engage with working people and listen to them on the issues that matter.  

However, the proof is in the pudding — no amount of conversation will change anything unless Labour is willing to listen to working people and to enact bold policies that respond to their interests.  

This means breaking with the neoliberalism to which the party has been tied for so long.

Unfortunately, the policy outline which accompanies this announcement does nothing of the sort.  

While the criticisms of Tory economic policy have become more strident, particularly the references to the tax system and the NHS, Miliband commits to very little by way of an alternative.  

Certainly, the announcement of £2.5 billion for the NHS and a modest increase in the minimum wage are to be welcomed but they hardly constitute an alternative economic strategy to support working people.

Of course, it is what is missing from the announcement that is most disappointing.  

Unlike the vast majority of the population, Miliband still seems unable to come out in support of rail renationalisation.  

Given the Tories’ outrageous attempt to reprivatise East Coast rail before May, this could have been a strong election issue and a clear vote-winner to boot.  

Not only that but it would make a serious contribution to the “rebuilding” of Britain “as a country” which Miliband claims he wants.
Similarly, while the NHS gets a mention and there is a vague reference to public services as a good thing, there are few, if any, concrete proposals.  

On education, for instance, the Tories are criticised for trebling tuition fees and yet there is no proposal to abolish them.  

And the scandal of academies and “free” schools goes unchallenged, although there was something of a whimper from Tristram Hunt over the weekend, following the National Audit Office’s damning report on the fragmentation of the education system.

And on zero-hours contracts, another clear-cut issue with an obvious and popular solution, Miliband seems determined to stick to the highly ambiguous phrase he used when questioned at the TUC in 2013 — “ending the exploitation of zero-hours contracts.”  

Unfortunately, without ending zero-hours contracts themselves, this is about as credible as his pledge on immigration — “outlawing the exploitation that leads to undercutting.”  

How he plans to achieve this is a mystery, given the fact that “free” movement of labour is fundamental to the EU and, as the announcement also makes clear, Labour remains committed to keeping Britain in the Bosses’ Club.

Unfortunately it is just not good enough. It is not good enough for Hunt to compare Michael Gove’s education reforms to Andrew Lansley’s dismantling of the National Health Service, without proposing to end the academies and free schools programme and bring schools back into the local authority family of schools.  

It is not good enough for Miliband to criticise Tory economic incompetence without a genuine plan for strategic state investment in manufacturing and other key sectors of the economy.  

And it is not good enough for the Labour Party to criticise Tory privatisation in the NHS but refuse to commit to renationalisation of public services, including water, energy, rail, Royal Mail and our schools.

We hope Labour listens to its activists when they report what working people tell them and we hope the decisive break with failed neoliberal policies comes soon. Unfortunately, the signs are not good.