The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, has finally revealed what was twitching behind his curtain: predistribution. Essentially, this means, rather than taxing the rich to fund welfare, the government should focus on making work pay more. This neologism fails in every possible way as a political currency.

First, this jarringly technocratic cadence speaks to no “common sense,” evokes no sentiment, accesses no shared assumptions about the economy, justice, fairness and so on. It sounds like what it is: the gruelly issue of wonkers and think-tankers. If it was a product, no one would buy it; if it was a headline, no one would read it. And no one will vote for it.

Second, it lacks any conceptual depth or concreteness. Reading Miliband’s speech, it is clear that he has some sense that the neoliberal “consensus” of the last three decades (though strictly speaking, it only became a consensus because Labour abandoned any rival project) is over. The growth formula based on low inflation (i.e. low wages), and deregulation has crashed. Cutting spending and relying on quantitative easing won’t work either. So, strictly in terms of finding an effective spatio-temporal fix for British capitalism’s problems, Miliband understands that the old formula isn’t working.  “Predistribution” is to be a socially just part of the answer to this problem by focusing government policy on the creation of a skilled, high-wage economy. This is to be achieved, it seems, through a combination of short-term fixes (bringing forward infrastructural investment projects, taxing banks modestly to fund house-building, etc), watered-down corporatism (for example, unions, businesses and the government collaborating on a new vocational education sector), and tighter government regulation of markets. This is, putting it generously, a mild version of the “social market” model that elements of the moderate trade union bureaucracy are calling for, and which New Labour dabbled in during its early years. The supply-side emphasis on improving skills and human capital is straight from Gordon Brown’s Treasury. It is also unlikely to drive up wages, as one of the reasons why skilled labour is relatively expensive is its rarety. Expanding the pool of skilled labour will simply depress its aggregate cost. Miliband’s speech is otherwise extremely vague about specific measures, and it isn’t at all clear that the proposals would either remotely answer the scale of the structural dysfunctions in British capitalism, or seriously counteracts the long-term tendency for labour’s share of national income to be depressed. Indeed, such material concessions to labour as are gestured at here are perfectly consistent with a long-term increase in the rate of exploitation which, judging from their growth strategies, both parties appear to agree is necessary to revive British capitalism. In fact, Miliband’s agenda of increasing the pool of skilled labour seems to be exactly along those lines: raising productivity while depressing unit costs.