Labour must attack the coalition, not each other

After a fall comes concussion. So it's perhaps unsurprising that barely six weeks after toppling from power, the parliamentary Labour party still looks rather dazed. The mood isn't quite as traumatised as in 1997, when shellshocked Conservative MPs would emerge from restaurants still looking expectantly for their old ministerial cars, and grandly refer questions to flunkies who no longer existed. But nonetheless, the process of grieving for power takes time. Unfortunately, it's time the nation doesn't have. The coalition is already busy swinging the axe, reshaping the political system, clearing what they regard as dead wood – from chiefs of defence staff to free school meal pilots . They have studied the early Blair years, understood his regret at not moving fast enough on reform, and don't intend to make the same mistake. Hence the suggestion by the Spectator editor Fraser Nelson earlier this week that, despite better than expected forecasts on some aspects of the public finances, George Osborne should seize his chance for ideologically driven cuts while Labour is still in disarray . With one opposition party absorbed into government and the other milling around in confusion, what better chance? The conventional wisdom seems to be that until September, when they'll acquire a new leader and presumably direction of travel, Labour can do little but gaze sadly at its navel. On the evidence of the Fabian leadership hustings I chaired earlier this week, the five candidates will certainly spend much of the summer trapped in what David Miliband calls "building a better yesterday", bickering about who secretly disagreed most with any policy deemed to have lost votes. (Success has many fathers: the 10p tax rate , strangely, is quite the orphan). Most took sideswipes at the coalition – Ed Balls closed by attacking the suggestion of the new government adviser Frank Field that school breakfast clubs be scrapped – but their audience is more interested in examining the entrails of the past. Learning the lessons of defeat is important for leadership candidates. But that doesn't excuse the whole of the parliamentary Labour party. Labour has a duty to hold the government to account, which means dividing MPs' energies better between the internal nervous breakdown and the day job. The response to the threat of a budget VAT rise was a classic example of how not to do it. Balls announced that he had wanted to rule out VAT rises in Labour's manifesto: Alistair Darling, the former chancellor, retorted that Balls had never wanted to rule out taxes at previous elections. Both may be right, but the spat made Labour look more interested in its internal blame game than in the millions who would suffer from higher VAT. The party might learn instead from Caroline Flint and Harriet Harman's brisk opposition to anonymity for rape defendants , suggesting that while in the long term Labour needs to reinvent itself, in the short term it can still do effective opposition. A little inside knowledge (Flint was a Home Office minister), brass neck, persistence and anger are all that's needed. Opposition like this requires a combination of wily old lags who know where Whitehall's bodies are buried, and Young Turks tabling freedom of information requests and concocting publicity stunts. Labour has promising old lags in the likes of Jack Straw and David Blunkett, and a smattering of Young Turks in newcomers such as Michael Dugher , the Downing Street aide turned MP. It has many fronts on which to attack. It just needs the energy to attack them.