Ed Miliband needs to find his inner Rocky

Pinned to the ropes, the only option is to come out throwing haymakers

It requires a mighty leap of the imagination to picture Ed Miliband as Rocky Balboa. Whenever you hear the opening notes of “Eye of the Tiger”, the last image to flash to mind is the youthful challenger from Hampstead.

When asked on Monday which experiences had hardened him for battle, Little Ed talked not of lugging animal carcasses around a stinking Philadelphia abattoir, but of teaching the Ivy Leaguers of Harvard in fragrant Massachusetts. Even Madame Tussauds at its most idiosyncratic would struggle to confuse the nerdy pup with Sylvester Stallone’s tongue-tied slugger.

I offer that stultifyingly obvious thought by way of pre-emptive warning that the advice about to follow might well strike you as emanating from a very distant outpost of the fantasy politics realm. Yet the moment has come, if he can somehow summon the demented bravado, for Miliband fully to unleash the inner Rocky – a figure at whom he has sometimes hinted before.

His current difference of opinion with various titans of commerce and their brethren in the Conservative press offers an opening that will not come again. The row kicked off on Sunday when Stefano Pessina, the owner of Boots, warned in an interview that Labour’s “anti-business” policies would be a catastrophe for Britain.

It then escalated to DefCon 2 when Labour struck back with references to Pessina’s status as an Italian multibillionaire resident of Monaco, and to the thoughtful financial arrangements which reduced by more than £1bn what Boots has paid in corporation tax in recent years.

Others have since joined the fray. Luke Johnson, the gifted entrepreneur who built his fortune by shrinking Pizza Express pizzas, came to Pessina’s defence. Stuart Rose, who vacated the Marks & Spencer’s helm not long after a profits warning, fretted about the “punitive taxes on business people” in a Daily Mail article headlined: “Why Labour’s class war on business would cripple Britain”. Sir Ian Cheshire, once of B&Q, lobbed in the accusation that Labour’s criticism of Pessina was an attempt to “stifle the debate”, and a case of “playing the man, not the ball”.

In fact, there was no ball to play because Pessina, when invited to do so, would not specify which policies cause him such alarm. Hence the suspicion that what really vexes him is Labour’s commitment to closing the loopholes that permit the likes of Boots to avoid taxation. Yet even the briefest textual analysis of such contributions dignifies them with more intellectual weight than they can bear. These are not carefully thought-out arguments sourced in a concern for the British workforce. They are screeches of confected hysteria.

Labour, as Miliband said in his 2011 conference speech, is not against business or profit. It is against allowing rapacious businesses to starve the Exchequer of that proportion of their profits which, morally if not legally, is its due. Miliband needs to say this, and more, incessantly between now and the election. He needs to say that we are nauseated by the sulphurous smokescreens that these bullies – and the Tory newspapers whose proprietors are equally unwilling taxpayers – billow out to mask their real motives. He needs to say that big businesses have never had it so good since the economic crash gifted them a huge and ridiculously cheap workforce in mortal terror of the sack, and with pitifully little protection against their employers.

He needs to say that, while, of course, he values wealth creators, he is sick to his eye teeth of listening to the wealthy (in government as well as in commerce) demonise the poor, who are to some degree entrenched in poverty because untold tens of billions that should be available to provide the life opportunities they need are diverted to tax havens. It emerged only yesterday that the company Samantha Cameron works for, the stationer Smythson, is now domicile in Luxembourg. That the revelation was censoriously reported in The Times, whose parent company has a record of colossal tax avoidance, is a tediously familiar irony.

Miliband needs to say that he is not driven by adolescent dreams of a socialist utopia, but by the simple moral and economic imperatives to temper the more grotesque excesses of unethical capitalism; that if this antagonises those newspapers which do their owners’ bidding by trying to scare voters into voting directly against their own economic interests – the central ambition of right-wing titles down the ages – he will live with whatever extra spite they throw at him in return; that if it mortifies the likes of Mr Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and other New Labour dinosaurs who still want to party like it’s 1997, the meteor crashed to earth in 2008.

He needs to say these things, relentlessly and with controlled rage, partly because they are the plain truth – a rare political commodity with the habit of gleaming through the fuggiest of smokescreens – and partly because in his position, already marooned so close to his minimum core vote in the polls, what serious choice does he have? Pinned to the ropes, taking hideous punishment day after day as he is, the only logical tactic is to come out throwing haymakers.

It didn’t work perfectly for Rocky against Apollo Creed, though the Italian Stallion only lost by the sort of contentious split decision that seems to be the height of Labour ambition in May. But even if going to war with the Italian rapscallion Signor Pessina and others of his transparently self-interested ilk left him more lethally bruised and bloodied than ever, much better to die on his feet, surely, than live for ever on his knees.

No doubt Miliband’s tremulous advisers would tell him that to take such an aggressive stance would be to highlight the ass in La Passionara. I think they would be wrong. The potential gain of playing the suicidally brave underdog who never knows when he is beaten must outweigh any potential deficit.

Unquestionably, Ed Miliband has it in him to be scrappy, though the memory of his attacks on as poisonously a vested interest as Rupert Murdoch’s has faded since he lost his confidence and his tongue. Here is a golden final chance to pick the right fight, and remind us by scrapping for his life. It is time he found his voice, and roared: “Bring it on!”