Ed Miliband needs more enemies if Labour is to revive its fortunes As well as being more precise, he must dare to enrage. In a New Statesman blog, Gavin Kelly, deputy chief of staff in Downing Street between 2007 and 2010 and now head of the Resolution Foundation, argues that "there will be no prizes for sounding more hawkish in the abstract and doveish when it comes to specifics." In other words, Miliband must set out some priorities and say how he will pay for them. If, for example, he wants better social care for the elderly and affordable child care to encourage women back to work, then he should say which groups - be they affluent pensioners or higher earners - should help foot the bill. As Kelly suggests, the first £10 billion looks relatively simple to finesse. But after that, what heads the Miliband wishlist? Trident, a 20th-century defence capability, or more social housing? Dare he move on to Lib Dem turf and demand a mansion tax and other levies on wealth? In today's speech, Miliband will, for the first time, reveal what a Labour government would look like in the wasteland of 2015. While sticking mainly to broad themes, he hopes to dispel the idea of a good-times party, conceding that "whoever is the next prime minister will not have money to spend." Being broke and being fair are not, in Miliband's view, incompatible. Instead, the bareness of the coffers makes responsible capitalism more vital. The years of plenty, in his argument, had a downside. Blair and Brown's deal, under which the market was left to rip and the dividends parcelled out to the needy, led to an increase in inequality. Unlike his predecessors, Miliband will not be able to offer cash blandishments. Nor will juggling regulation be enough to hardwire fairness into society. Someone will have to pay. Miliband, his advisers promise, will shortly be saying who. Only when the targeted groups start clamouring for his head will he know that he is displaying the strategic direction that Labour has so far lacked. The row over high pay is ideal terrain on which to start. The head of RBS's investment bank is reportedly in line for a £4 million special bonus, and David Cameron's limp plans to allow shareholders to veto fat cat excesses are already in disarray. With analysis by the IPPR think tank showing that bank bosses have received an average 81 per cent increase in remuneration while the value of their businesses rose by 19 per cent, Miliband's call for proper curbs, including putting workers on remuneration committees, strikes the right note. Step two, asserting authority, will be harder. Despite allies" attempts to liken him to Margaret Thatcher, anyone who has seen her biopic will be unlikely to detect a metallurgical link between the self-styled "man of steel" and the Iron Lady. Even so, Miliband must be tough enough to make powerful enemies (Rupert Murdoch's scalp will not suffice) and impose more discipline on his friends. Not all great leaders have obvious potential. As Clement Attlee wrote of himself: Few thought he was even a starter/There were many who thought themselves smarter/ But he ended PM, CH and OM / An earl and a knight of the garter. While Miliband may strike few as an Attlee-in-waiting, he has shown flashes of brilliance, crushing Cameron on predatory capitalism and the "squeezed middle." The Prime Minister has a Labour weak spot. His crass description of Ed Balls as a Tourette's sufferer reveals how rattled he is by the shadow chancellor. The difficulty for Miliband is that Balls provokes similar neuralgia in some senior Labour figures. The advice currently being directed at Miliband could be construed, without much difficulty, as semi-veiled attacks on Balls. That antipathy, fuelled by old resentment and unjustified suspicions about Balls's loyalty, is surfacing because the shadow chancellor, though right in all details about the ills of Osbornomics, has won back no trust for Labour on the economy. That is by no means all Balls's fault. His inclination is to kick the Government, avoid detail about future spending and assume that voters will eventually turn to Labour. He may have stuck too rigidly to this formula, and his speech to the Fabian Society this Saturday will broaden out his argument. Even so, Balls's so far thankless role is to castigate a surprisingly resilient Government while Miliband takes on the more enviable task of party visionary. Attlee left the Foreign Office to its own devices, noting "that if you have a good dog you don't bark yourself. I had a very good dog in Mr Ernest Bevin. Miliband, while working with the best rottweiler in politics, cannot be so hands-off on the economy. He must, however, make clear that he will not tolerate lazy attacks on his shadow chancellor. Like the pearl necklace that Mrs Thatcher's image-makers tried in vain to jettison, Ed Balls is "non-negotiable." Labour's future depends, as Miliband knows, on the adamantine qualities of a shadow chancellor who once imposed a two-year spending freeze with barely a nod to Tony Blair, and whose often-overlooked taste for parsimony is the key to his party's comeback. 2012 is do-or-die year. If Labour is to prise itself off the ropes, Ed Miliband needs more enemies, and Ed Balls needs more friends.