“WE ARE all entitled.” That was the message delivered, with quivering passion, by a woman attending a “People’s Policy Forum” hosted by the Labour Party in Nottingham today. In all, some 2,000 members of the public had responded to emailed invitations sent to more than 100,000 voters by party bosses.

The day-long forum was centred on a question and answer session with the leader, Ed Miliband. His mission was threefold: to show that Labour is listening mode after electoral defeat. To advance a case that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition is playing “the politics of division” in a return to the 1980s. Finally, Mr Miliband had to prepare the ground for his appearance a day later on March 26th at a huge trade union rally against public spending cuts in central London: an event that carries risks for the Labour leader, either by painting him as a creature of the public sector trade unions, or—should violent protests spin off from the main march—by associating him with militancy that is not to the tastes of middle England.

Alas, the forum left Labour looking marginal and unmoored from the realities of austerity Britain. The problem was not Mr Miliband. He was not great, but not terrible. He waffled, he pandered a bit, he failed miserably to present a vision for Britain in 2015 when directly challenged to do so. The marchers in London, Mr Miliband carefully argued, would be people like nurses, small businessmen from Liverpool or people from Hampshire worried about the closure of Sure Start centres for young children. There would be policemen patrolling the march, but also off-duty policemen on the march. This, he said, would be the “mainstream majority”.

But the real problem lay elsewhere. For hour after hour, in policy session after policy session, Mr Miliband and his shadow ministerial team were bombarded with angry, self-righteous demands for Labour to wave a magic wand and make the cuts go away.