The blame is all Labour's if it leaks a large chunk of votes to the Greens Ed Miliband pitched up at the University of London last week to make a speech hyped up as his comeback. You may have heard bits of it: he warned of the dangers of what he called a "zero-zero economy" (zero-hours contracts for the unfortunate; zero tax for the lucky few), and took issue with Ukip. "We will be talking more about immigration as a party," he said. But lest anyone picture some desperate stampede into quasi-Farageism, he assured his audience that he and his colleagues would address the issue "on the basis of Labour values, not Ukip values." He went on: "Unlike the Tories, what we will never do is try to out-Ukip Ukip." With a flourish worthy of an irate Vicar, what Farage and his friends stood for, Miliband said, was "not really very attractive." In response to his recent woes, he had apparently decided to re-emphasise his liberal-left instincts. And in due course, a version of that proudly progressive pitch was voiced by Sadiq Khan, the close political associate of Miliband who has recently been given the job of stemming Labour's loss of support to the Green party. "What's frustrating for me is that people don't realise how much we've changed since the New Labour days," Khan said at the weekend. He was visiting the constituency of Brighton Pavilion, held by the Greens" former leader Caroline Lucas. From the conversations I've had with potential Green voters, what's interesting is that the things that motivate and enthuse them are the same things as us ... I challenge people to show me a party six months before a general election with more bolder [sic], radical policies than we've got, with a chance of winning. So there it was: never mind Lucas and her various attachments to renewable energy, greater equality and being nice to foreign people: Miliband had all that covered. This week, unfortunately, has found Labour singing a drastically different tune, to the point that watching their senior figures has started to feel a bit like listening to one of those strange medley records from the 1980s, in which a boom-crash beat would pound away behind 30-second snatches of old hits, and one never had any idea what was going to happen next. Miliband and Khan's efforts may have sounded mellifluous enough, but along has come a bracing flavour of what the leader actually meant when he served notice that Labour would be "talking more about immigration": two big interventions that have implicitly affected sympathy with Ukip's view of the world, and found Labour people trying to sound more tough - though "shrill" is a better word - than the Conservatives. In terms of tonal consistency, it all rather suggests that old boom-crash beat, and a heartwarming rendition of We Shall Overcome suddenly giving way to Paranoid by Black Sabbath. On Tuesday, the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, promised to recruit 1,000 more border staff, and to go back to fingerprinting "illegal migrants caught stowing away at Calais." By way of bathos, she also warned of an "arms race of rhetoric" about immigration between Ukip and the Tories. The same day, Rachel Reeves, who holds the work and pensions brief - and these days wears a rictus-like grin in rough proportion to the extent to which what she has to say conflicts with her metro-left background - joined in. "Labour will put fairness and responsibility at the heart of Britain's welfare system by restricting benefits which jobseekers from the EU can claim," she wrote for MailOnline. That means banning jobseekers from claiming out-of-work benefits for two years, and ending child benefit and child tax credits from being sent abroad. Her first proposal is actually illegal under European law, one indication of how the announcements and their surrounding noise quickly blurred into outright silliness. My favourite example was a paraphrased claim in the Financial Times from a party official, that potential migrants "should not travel to Britain unless they had a realistic prospect of finding a stable job." Has Labour ever clocked the parts of the economy that migrants keep ticking over? Strangely, there aren't many stable jobs there. Aside from where all this leaves any coherent Labour stance on the EU (which, with a possible in/out referendum looming, is something they probably ought to think about), what's most remarkable is the fact that Labour believes it can speak to two supposedly very different separate audiences without either of them actually noticing. This is a time-honoured trick that goes back to the Blair and Brown years. Back then, it tended to be used when a big policy shift was afoot, and was usually manifested in contrasting articles in different newspapers. In the summer of 2007, for example, the then work and pensions secretary, James Purnell, launched a green paper on so-called welfare reform. In the Guardian - cue acoustic guitars and candles - he pledged to help 200,000 children out of poverty, allow separated parents on benefits to keep all of their maintenance benefits, and expand treatment for those with drug problems, but also require them to accept this help or lose benefits. The next day, with help from Purnell's spinners, the Daily Mail ran the heavy metal version. The headline was "Work - or lose your handouts: Jobless will have to pick up litter to earn benefit," and the details of what Labour wanted were summarised thus: "Making the work-shy pick up litter," and ensuring that "Jobless addicts who try to dodge the rules by hiding their habit will instead be deemed welfare cheats obtaining state handouts by deception." The basic mentality at work was flatly daft, even then, but now - with social media having ensured that one paper's readership blurs into another's, and a frantic news cycle meaning that outlets on the liberal left gobble up stories aimed at the political right - and vice versa - the game is surely up. Still, with David Cameron about to follow the Rochester byelection with his own big immigration panic, and the Labour leadership apparently sticking to the idea that elections can be won by aiming messages at carefully selected segments of the public and telling them roughly what they want to hear, none of this is likely to go away. The result: from Miliband down, Labour people increasingly seem inconsistent, incoherent, in dire danger of looking as if they take the electorate for fools, and nasty with it. Already, I would imagine, far more people than Labour would like feel repulsed by such behaviour, and what it will surely entail if the party manages to re-enter government. Some may yet grit their teeth and stick with old habits. But at this rate, would anyone be surprised if, contrary to Sadiq Khan's protestations, an uncomfortable number went for a party whose best face suggests such cynicism's exact reverse - and voted Green?