Mr Miliband suggests that economic recovery is only half of the battle; ensuring that the benefits of growth flow to ordinary folk is the other.

Ed Miliband’s fortunes have improved of late. His personal polling is close to that of David Cameron at the same stage in his leadership. His conference speech last year, which ushered in the slogan “One Nation Labour”, drew praise from acolytes and critics alike. The latest Guardian/ICM poll gives Labour its largest lead since 2003—and puts the party ahead of the Conservatives on the economy. So far, so mid-term. Most Tories are relatively sanguine. All oppositions do well between elections, they say, pointing to Labour’s two-time election loser, Neil Kinnock. Even a modest economic recovery would give David Cameron a compelling electoral argument, they add: now things are finally getting better, do you really want to give the keys back to the people who crashed the car? This flirts with over-confidence. All the same, Mr Miliband needs a riposte. In a speech this morning, he ventured one: economic recovery is only half of the battle; ensuring that the benefits of growth flow to ordinary folk is the other. The two imperatives are mutually dependent, he argued, and the government is failing on both. Though its emphasis was on the current government’s failings, the Labour leader’s argument spanned the economic policies of the last 30 years. His contention was that even before the economic downturn, the British economy was out-of-gear: even when the engine (growth and productivity gains) is whirring, the wheels (widespread improvements in living standards) do not turn. “Over the last three decades or so, less than 15 pence of every additional pound Britain has made has gone to an entire half of the population,” he noted.

This diagnosis draws on many of the ideas bubbling away in Mr Miliband’s unabashedly academic salon of economists, politicos and philosophers. One chart in particular informs its arguments. Devised by Simon Rosenberg, the founder of the New Democrat Network, “the most important chart in American politics” shows that US household incomes have lagged behind GDP and productivity growth since the early 1990s. The same observation, reckon senior Labourites, lies at the heart of Britain’s woes, too.

A British equivalent of the chart looks like this: