SOCIALISTS will rightly find much to criticise in the industrial strategy set out by Ed Miliband yesterday.

On far too many issues Labour still takes its lead from the Tories. 

Pledges to keep our scandalously low corporation taxes “the most competitive in the G7” and a doleful promise that public spending will continue to fall feed the Conservative myths that the public sector was somehow responsible for the bankers’ crash and that cutting taxes is the key to economic success.

Equally, the “change from Labour’s past” the leader indicates was not the rejection of new Labour’s disastrous legacy the party so desperately needs.

Miliband says he recognises that “we cannot simply succeed with redistribution or with tax and spend,” but those were not the problems with the 1997-2010 Labour governments.

Apart from their blood-soaked foreign policy, they were guilty of saddling our hospitals with unbearable levels of PFI debt, placing the Bank of England beyond democratic control and prostrating themselves before the financial spivs who ended by derailing the entire economy.

The Labour leader did not distance himself from those aspects of his party’s past.

Indeed, his vision of how to “help millions more businesses grow, succeed and create wealth” was depressing in its total failure to mention public ownership — the only way to make sure vital services are operated in the public interest.

No doubt he realises that the nationalisation of our transport, energy and water supplies — all backed by an overwhelming majority of Britons — would not be permitted by the European Union he made a point of swearing allegiance to yesterday.

So despite Ukip’s bizarre reference to “Soviet-style tractor production targets for every firm,” the “better plan for a better future” unveiled by Miliband was not socialist.

Even so it marked out key differences from Conservative and Liberal Democrat policy which make it clear that a Labour victory in May is the best realistic outcome for Britain’s workers.

Miliband is absolutely right to distinguish between “short-term, fast buck wealth creation” by parasitical speculators and an economy which invests to ensure “long-term, sustainable prosperity.”

And his emphasis on prioritising manufacturing industries over hedge funds is even more welcome.

As Unite’s Tony Burke points out, specific commitments to invest in apprenticeships and skilled jobs on decent wages are a dramatic improvement on the low-skill, low-pay, zero-security job market the Tories have presided over.

Miliband remains too wary of being demonised by right-wing press barons to talk openly about the working class, but his unashamed declaration that “every single person is a wealth creator” throws down the gauntlet to a Tory Party that pretends wealth is created by the people who own businesses rather than the people who work for a living.

As an industrial strategy, it’s a start. It doesn’t go nearly far enough to ensure a Labour win at the general election or prove that such a win would deliver for Britain’s workers.

Even the modest proposals Miliband did make had to be followed by an Ed Balls cameo insisting on capping child benefit and introducing a means-tested element to the winter fuel allowance for pensioners. 

This “build-me-up-buttercup-just-to-let-me-down” act has defined the Labour front bench and won’t help to win back the millions of once loyal voters the party has abandoned.