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If political success were measured in conference speeches, Ed Miliband would be on the home straight. He may not be a Churchillian orator. But he's now delivered three years of noteless performances that have recast discredited New Labour politics and broken with failed economic orthodoxy.
Today in Brighton he fleshed out his attacks on "predatory capitalism" and the "race to the bottom" with a string of signature commitments: a freeze in electricity prices, breakup of the energy monopolies, abolition of the bedroom tax, a tougher minimum wage, 200,000 new homes a year by 2020, extra childcare and a switch of tax cuts from big to small businesses.
The aim was to challenge the corrosive conviction that politics can make no difference to the living standards crisis presided over by David Cameron – the man Miliband damned as "strong at standing up to the weak but weak when it comes to standing up to the strong".
The Conservative media needed little encouragement from Miliband's claim that he was "bringing back socialism" to howl with outrage at the prospect of controls on rogue landlords, property developers and exploitative employers. The private energy cartel immediately threatened that a price freeze would lead to blackouts.
All this follows a gathering press onslaught against Miliband. The Labour leader is relentlessly cast as a geeky loser. But the real problem seems not to be his personal and political weaknesses, but the possibility – if not likelihood, on the basis of current polling – that he might actually win the next election. Media attacks had already reached fever pitch over the toxic confessions of industrial-scale personal smearing of Gordon Brown's enemies by his one-time spin doctor, Damian McBride.
Anyone who followed the antics of either the Blairite or Brownite wings of New Labour (or who even just watched The Thick of It) would know that hand-to-hand character assassination was the stock in trade of two factions separated far more by style and ambition than political substance.
But that wasn't Miliband's game. In any case, hyper-spinning was far from the worst of New Labour's sins, which ran from the embrace of City deregulation and privatisation to illegal wars. And despite Miliband's crab-like attempts to move beyond it, New Labour lives on, in both its Blairite and Brownite incarnations.
Take Ed Balls's speech on Monday, which was strikingly reminiscent of classic Brown – from his pledge to use a higher bank levy to fund childcare to his "iron" commitments to match George Osborne's 2015-16 current spending limits. Balls even managed to win a smattering of applause for a promise to use the proceeds from selling RBS and Lloyds to pay down debt – or privatisating banks to appease the bond markets, in other words.
But that wasn't the mood of Labour's delegates, better reflected in the standing ovation given to the Unite leader, Len McCluskey, when he called on the party to stand up for organised labour – or their overwhelming vote for the lifting of the public sector pay cap (which is backed by Balls and Miliband in their effort to win fiscal credibility).
The shadow chancellor's conversion from Keynesian champion to stern austerian, even while the economy is operating far below capacity and investment is flat on its back, is fraught with dangers for Labour's prospects, both before and after the election. If he is drawn by the Tories into making still more far-reaching commitments to cuts and caps – while resisting, for example, the chance to use the part-nationalised banks to drive investment and growth – it would threaten the very commitments on the cost of living and housing Miliband made today.
Economic credibility can only be gained in the eyes of Labour's opponents to the extent that its policies match the coalition's. But most voters still oppose the scale and speed of cuts and, as former Conservative vice-chairman Lord Ashcroft's polling shows, Labour leads the Tories on the economy and jobs in marginal seats by 44% to 33%.
Part of the perception of Miliband as weak has been about Labour's lack of clear policy alternatives. But it also reflects the weight he has given to party unity at the expense of clarity and political allies. Now he has the chance to use his shadow cabinet reshuffle to ditch the disloyal and put his stamp on a team that should already be gearing up for an early election.
It's becoming fashionable for Miliband's critics – among them the New Labour architect Peter Mandelson – to argue that the Labour leader was among those who misread the political impact of the crash of 2008 and wrongly thought it would lead to a shift to the left.
In fact, the electoral pattern since the fall of Lehman Brothers five years ago has overwhelmingly been the defeat of incumbents, whether nominally of left or right. That has been the case in 29 of 35 elections in Europe – and in terms of party, that's also what happened when Barack Obama was elected president in the US. In Latin America, by contrast, more radical leftwing incumbents have been repeatedly re-elected.
What is true is that left-of-centre parties which fail to recognise, as Miliband has done, that the "free market" model of the past 30 years is bust have paid the electoral price. The question now is whether the Labour leader is able to turn that understanding into a viable social democratic programme for a new era.
Twitter: @SeumasMilne
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