Ask Ed- just don’t expect much in the way of an answer.

In the latest wheeze to emerge from its ‘Refounding Labour’ consultation document members of the public are to be invited to take part in a series of policy workshops taking place at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool later this month followed by a Q and A session with leader Ed Milliband. This will be paired, bizarrely, with a talent contest for sixteen to twenty four year olds with skills in music, acting, filmmaking or with an idea for a new business or invention where the prize is a paid work placement.

The open day, claimed by party insiders to be the first of its kind staged by a British political party, will cover three topics, youth opportunity, the cost of living and economic growth and building stronger communities. All worthy stuff no doubt, but hardly the sort of thing that will have people queuing around the block for tickets.

As for the talent show aspect of proceedings, that, said a party spokesperson, was designed to ‘celebrate the potential of young people;’ again this is all very worthy and a definite change from the vilification of the young as obese, benefits scroungers with an inflated sense of entitlement that has been a staple of the media coverage of the riots and their aftermath.

Earlier this week the wing of the Labour Party that still longs for Tony Blair to make a comeback was said to be ‘dismayed’ by Ed Milliband’s plan to attack David Cameron as an old style Tory grandee with little idea about how ordinary Britons live. This, they seemed to think, was evidence that Ed really was a red and any day now would be donning a donkey jacket and calling for Trident to be scrapped.

On one level you can see why the party might have been concerned by their leader’s analysis of the man he wants to replace as Prime Minister. Elections aren’t won by stating the obvious; but on the whole it seems the boys and girls in the New Labour bubble have nothing to worry about. Ed isn’t red; he’s barely even pink.

If you need evidence of this then look no further than the plan described above. Let’s just count the ways in which it can be shown to be damaging nonsense.

For a start even though he might not like to admit it Ed Milliband is the leader of a political party, an organisation that depends for its survival on having a strong grassroots membership who feel they have a stake in what their party stands for. A key part of that is being involved in making the policies they will have to go out and sell to the public on the doorstep. Inviting people with no link to the Labour Party and who might not even vote for it at the next election to take part in the process makes a mockery of the commitment shown by ordinary members without whom there wouldn’t be a party for Ed Millibad to lead.

It is also far from clear what real impact these chit-chats will actually have on policy. Participation will be so tightly controlled by the party’s full time organisers, a paranoid bunch at the best of times, that anyone with anything remotely controversial to say will be ruthlessly weeded out. All that will be produced will be a pile of spoilt flip charts and a neatly ticked box marked ‘engagement’, allowing the party to scamper on down the road to disaster in the way it had been planning to all along.

There is also something deeply patronising about the fact that it is deemed necessary to include a spurious talent show element in proceedings. It is almost as if the hierarchy of what used to be the people’s party now think the people will only pay attention to things if they are a bit like the X Factor.

Worst of all this whole sorry performance will bring us no clearer to understanding what the Labour Party stands for. Have lessons been learnt from their defeat in May 2010 and the slow crumbling of its core support that has taken place over the preceding two decades?

The one thing it does tell us is what a Labour government led by if not Ed then by one of the members of the shadow cabinet waiting patiently for him to slip off the narrow ledge over a bottomless pit that is leadership of a political party in its first term out of office would be like. It would be the same sorry New Labour story, all focus groups and spin; endless initiatives and targets hiding a deep dislike of the party membership and a patronising approach towards the wider voting public that we came to know so well and like so little from 1997 onwards.

If the best Ed Milliband and his shadow cabinet can come up with after almost a year spent gazing into their collective navels is to turn the party conference, a body that should be about giving grassroots members a voice in the making of its policies, into a tawdry talent show; then perhaps it is time the membership responded in kind by not voting them through to the next round.

Project Re-launch.

Speaking at his party’s national policy forum in Gillingham this weekend Ed Milliband said that it was time for Labour to ‘take back the term Big Society’ from the Conservatives and to become again the ‘people’s party.’

His comments came at the launch of a major review of party policy headed by former Cabinet Office minister Liam Byrne that in many respects mirrors David Cameron’s mostly successful attempt to ‘detoxify’ the image of the Tories. The review will cover the party’s stance of troublesome issues such as tax, immigration and welfare and will see shadow ministers leading policy discussions with party members.

Speaking to assembled delegates Mr Milliband said the party needed to be ‘reconnected to the hopes and aspirations of the people of Britain’ and had to prove that the policy review was a genuinely open minded exercise not one run by ‘a bunch of experts gathered in a room in London’ and determined to prove their own opinions correct.

He also admitted that in government Labour had ‘got some things wrong’; try almost everything wrong from 2005 onwards Ed, and that the party had been guilty of ‘losing its way.’ Most tellingly of all he admitted that they had too often seen problems in communities and thought the answer was ‘a programme or a policy,’ sometimes the policy was right; often it wasn’t and Labour was equally often too insular to notice until it was too late.

There were more admissions from shadow Welsh Secretary Peter Hain, who will chair the policy review, the party had, he said, to be ‘a changed Labour party for the next general election’, the public had grown tired of and cynical about the New Labour project and as a result the party had ‘got a hammering’ in May and needed to learn the lessons of that experience.

All this mea culpa stuff is very nice and cathartic in its way, but it needs more than well meaning navel gazing to turn around a party that doesn’t know what its for or who it represents. The policy review and the party as a whole will stand or fall on whether or not it can turn talk into action.

It will also stand or fall on what sort of figure Ed Milliband cuts as an opposition leader, perhaps the most thankless job in British politics. Every day is a struggle not to trip on one banana thrown in your path by the media or the government, so far, I’m afraid Red Ed’s report card would read ‘could do better.’

He appears awkward and earnest in public, making him a poor foil for Citizen Dave with his easy charm and has allowed the media to drag him into silly controversies about whether he plans to marry his long term partner or whether or not he has been recorded as the father on the birth certificate of his oldest child. When he comes into contact with ‘ordinary’ voters Milliband looks uncomfortable as evidenced by his bemused response to TESCO workers this week who told him they didn’t think the welfare system gave people an incentive to work.

There is also the small problem of having a shadow cabinet that seems to be pulling in two directions at once. For example shadow chancellor Alan Johnson wants to loosen the party’s ties with the unions, his leader knows only too well that he owes his position to the unions and that without their cash the party would be bankrupt.

The good news though is that despite a shaky start Ed Milliband is starting to sound like his own man at last. He cut several large donors out of the honours list and has admitted publicly that his in ‘unashamed’ about being a socialist; thank heavens for that for far too long socialism has been a naughty word in a party that would have no reason to exist without it.

Taking socialism out of mothballs and putting it at the centre of party policy might just be the saving of the Labour Party, however much their leader talks about replacing GDP with a ‘happiness index’ as a measure of national progress the spending cuts will drag the Tories and their Lib Dem accomplices to the right; that movement needs to be counterbalanced by an opposition that leans to the left, clinging to the middle ground is no longer an option.

Labour has, though, to pick the right kind of socialism, the insular, sectarian and often silly incarnation practiced by the so called ‘loony left’ is a non starter because it frightens voters because its adherents seem to rejoice in not connecting with the public mood. Ed Milliband needs to go out and talk to party members and public alike about a form of socialism that is based on the fairness deeply engrained in the British character that doesn’t hold back personal ambition only requires it to be tempered with a responsibility towards the society we all share.

It won’t be easy, the media will pillory him as being out of touch because they, as all cynics do, instinctively fear anyone with a ‘vision’; his political opponents will try to shout him down, he must ignore all this and keep on talking about what he believes is right.

If Ed Milliband really wants to make Labour the ‘people’s party’ again and to be ‘back on people’s side, back in power making the fairer, the more equal, the more just country we believe in,’ as he claimed in his speech at Gillingham he has no other choice.