Labour’s final party conference before the general election is when it sets out its policies and the party leader is presented as a prime minister in waiting.

This time we will see nothing like that.

It’s policies seem to be collection of ill-formed ideas designed to raise popular anxieties about the cost of living.

Yesterday we saw a pledge to increase the national minimum wage to £8 over the course of five years, heaping yet more burden on small business.

Ed Miliband looks less credible as a future PM than any Labour leader in the past 30 years.

Rather than developing a strategy for governing the nation Labour hopes it can cobble together a coalition of the disgruntlement to get them into power. What it will do with it is anyone’s guess.

Miliband refuses to acknowledge any responsibility for the mess in the public finances that the last government left behind.

He also refuses to concede that the Coalition was entitled to any praise for the economic growth that is generating record levels of job creation.

In its last 13 years in office, Labour massively expanded the public sector.

Labour left an unreformed NHS completely vulnerable to rapid changes in demography.

Labour presided over unsustainable levels of immigration.

Labour created a housing shortage that it now blame on others.

Labour failed to curb the soaring cost of welfare.

Let’s not forget that all this happened recently. Labour was in office a little more than four years ago. Nor has Labour learnt its lessons. A report today from the Centre for Policy Studies calculates that Labour’s tax proposals could result in 306,500 fewer jobs over the following four years.