It was a good speech [2] from Ed Miliband today. He’s clearly been reading the New Statesman, which endorsed his bid [3] for the leadership in 2010, just one of the many things we’ve got right over recent years – such as our forecast long ago that premature fiscal consolidation would result in a double dip recession [4], predicting a hung parliament (when no one else did) and calling for UK withdrawal from Afghanistan and talks with Taliban (now a mainstream position).

We’ve consistently [5] argued [6] that Labour should seek to reduce the tax burden for low and middle income earners and, because capital is so mobile and the very rich are so adept at avoiding income tax, find new ways of taxing unearned income and static assets, such as mansions and land. This is not a left/right issue: Vince Cable, Martin Wolf, of the Financial Times, and Tim Montgomerie, of the excellent ConservativeHome website, are all in favour of the introduction of new wealth taxes.

The UK needs a more resilient tax base and Labour, if it is to have any chance of winning again, must abandon unreconstructed statism and its old, failed tax and transfer redistributive model (we consider National Insurance to be a form of income tax, and Gordon Brown certainly used it as such with his devious manoeuvres). That’s why we support greater emphasis on “predistribution” (awful word but good concept [7]). 

In last week’s magazine we supported [8], as George says [9], the admirable Conservative MP for Harlow (my old home town [10] in Essex) Robert Halfon’s call for the restoration of the 10p tax band for earnings between the personal allowance, which will rise to £9,440 in April, and £12,000, a measure worth £256 to basic-rate taxpayers. Now Ed Miliband is saying that Labour would reintroduce the 10p rate. That is smart politics, and just the kind of distinctive policy it will need as it seeks to remake itself as the party of social justice, entrepreneurial initiative and the competent state in the run-up to the 2015 election. Above all, Labour needs to show that it has learned the lessons of the Blair/Brown years, when asset bubbles were allowed to inflate dangerously, the party became carless and arrogant in power and far too nonchalant about rising inequality. Game on.