Wherefore art thou Labour?

I am totally convinced that if you called an election today and at the same time hog-tied David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith, laid them on a bed of fraudulent expense claims in a seedy brothel and then called every national newspaper, Labour would still find a way to lose the election!

Take yesterday for example. Labour had it made – Spelman had to return to the House of Commons and apologise because she got the forestry sale wrong. In the same day, Iain Duncan Smith was forced to back down about the housing benefit reduction for long-term unemployed.

Did Labour come out fighting and baying for blood? Of course not – first they sent in Mary Creagh to waffle on endlessly about how Labour were bigger and better tree-huggers than the Conservatives. By the time she had finished, half the elected members were cheerfully snoozing away and all you could hear in the chamber were gentle snores coming from one or two of the leading lights in the 1922 Committee.

Labour didn’t even get excited when Iain Duncan Smith presented his welfare reform bill to parliament – this is despite the fact that many will suffer. Clause 51, for example, contains proposals, as yet scarcely noticed, that seriously jeopardise the income of many disabled people. Consider a stroke victim, who may have paid national insurance for decades before incurring a severe impairment from which there is no prospect of recovery. If they have even a low-paid working spouse, the bill will cut their money off cold the moment that 12 months have passed.

According to forensic analysis by Tim Leunig, an economist at the London School of Economics who has recently been appointed to the leading liberal think tank Centre Forum, it could leave large families even in deeply unfashionable corners of the capital trying to scrape by on £3 per person each day. And the entire bill is underpinned by a recasting of the rules on indexation, which will steadily make the poor poorer. Instead of being pegged to the total cost of living, benefits will in future be pegged to the cost of shopping, thereby stripping the rising price of keeping a roof over one's head out of the general calculation.

But did the Labour benches howl, rant and scream? Nah – they sat there whimpering, like a dog with a cut paw. They looked and behaved in a way that suggested they felt impotent and in many respects they are. Ed Miliband has proven to be almost laughable at PMQs – a guaranteed butt for the jokes and sarcasm pouring from David Cameron’s drippingly wealthy lips. As for the rest of them? Well Ed Balls has been something of a non-event – many predicted fire and brimstone. What we have had so far is more akin to tepid and mediocre. Yvette Cooper, supposedly one of the key brains in the Shadow Cabinet and a possible future leadership candidate, has been conspicuous by her silence. Not that there has been much going on in the world for her to talk about – Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Iran Bahrain, and of course, Afghanistan.

Then of course there is Liam Byrne. You may know the name but not remember why – he is actually the shadow secretary for Work and Pensions. Now, this week they announced the unemployment figures and the statistics made for pretty unpleasant reading - 2.5m people unemployed, the number of people in full-time work down 5,000 on the previous year, 2.2m people economically inactive because they are on long-term sick leave and 15% of people work part-time do so because they can’t find full-time work.

If the overall statistics were bad, they were dreadful when it came to the 16 to 24 year olds – 965,000 are out of work, a rate of 20.5%.

Against this, Chris Grayling emphasised there had been an increase of 40,000 new job vacancies in the three months to January. What he didn’t tell the House was these figures include openings for those taken on temporarily to conduct the 2011 census. If you exclude these vacancies, the actual increase was a meagre 8,000.

Now I may have blinked, but I don’t recall Byrne savaging the Tories about these results. Oh sure, they grunted a little and made polite moans in the appropriate places, but very few Tories would have felt a need to quake in their boots.

If Labour is going to have the audacity to call themselves the Opposition, they need to do just that – oppose. This doesn’t mean languishing on the green leather of the House of Commons chamber dozing off. It means vociferously and actively standing against all legislation attacking working class people.

It demands they stand against the government when they want to squeeze the poor, whilst dishing out £2bn to multinational corporations to run the Community Payback scheme.

If Labour is going to have any chance of impacting on the Tories it needs to re-evaluate its entire approach. This will mean dropping the “Mr Nice Guy” image and becoming tougher and more willing to resist. A number of Labour activists are already active in anti-cuts groups, but this need to seep through the sytem to the party leadership. Labour must take a more vital role in the Coalition against the Cuts and the Right to Work movement.

Has Ed Miliband got what it takes to lead such a party? This morning I am not so sure.