August politics is always hell. The happy are on holiday. The miserable have free rein to whinge. Ed Miliband returns to work today amid a chorus of charges that Labour has no vision, no strategy, no policies. With the coalition emerging from recession with a predictable upturn in popularity, the old doubts about Miliband's competence are revived.

Getting Labour into shape after the shambles of the late Blair-Brown era was always to be an awesome task, comparable to that facing the Tories in 1997. Labour's senior figures, notably Ed Balls, have assuaged their contortions of guilt with much sound and fury, but little by way of alternative policies. Miliband and Balls have concentrated on noisy performances in parliament, with some effect, but have failed to emerge as plausible national leaders.

Their programme has been a pale imitation of the Tories. They are for cuts, but not too deep, for glamour projects, for monetary caution, for the Afghan war. A fear of seeming too leftwing has led them to fudge every opportunity the ineptitude of the coalition has offered them, on welfare capping, on immigration, on the NHS, on housing. It is hard to see the British Labour party as a leftwing party at all.

Miliband's great task is to unburden himself of past guilt and chart a recovery distinct from the hesitancy of the coalition. The causes, good leftwing ones, are there in abundance. The case for stimulating consumption rather than banking goes begging, largely because Miliband and Balls remain in thrall to banking as the central institution of the economy. Labour should set cities free to raise local property taxes and relieve the deep cuts in local services. It should be the party of urban house-building rather than rural development. It should pick up its old causes, minimum wages, localised healthcare, town and country planning, community education, the arts in the provinces.

Miliband must put his past behind him. He needs round him fresh voices free of guilt, to champion causes and groups the coalition has sorely offended. He might even call it new Labour.