IF PRIMARK is having trouble shifting jeans at £8 a pair, then the British economy really is up a well-known creek. But yesterday the company announced that UK sales had slowed for the first time in five years; some retail analysts believe that on the standard ‘like for like’ yardstick , they could even be falling.

Little facts like that that can sometimes tell you more than the macroeconomic headlines, but even by those lights, things are not encouraging. When it was provisionally announced that UK gross domestic product fell by 0.5% in last quarter of 2010, most market commentators believed that the final figure would be more encouraging. It was, at minus 0.6, even worse.

So  Ed Miliband is entirely correct to focus Labour’s political attention on what he refers to as ‘the squeezed middle’, by which he seems to mean more or less the in-work working class. His address to the Resolution Foundation yesterday was laden with classic social democratic themes.

Rumour has it that Mandelson banned the use of the word ‘inequality’ in speeches by New Labour politicians. Yet there it was, together with the affirmation that rectifying inequality is why Miliband is in politics. While that will not strike most socialists as a particularly strong statement, it is a long, long time since a Labour leader has actually said as much from a public platform.

The SM makes up the mainstay of Primark’s punters, of course. If they are thinking twice about treating themselves to the odd new T-shirt, it is because the need to put food on the table and to run the car is forcing them to watch what they spend.

In the past, many of them would borrow freely to boost their consumption. Miliband also does well to highlight the important role played in recent decades by cheap credit as a means by which aggregate demand could be maintained without paying higher wages.

This has been tantamount to what some radical economised have dubbed ‘privatised Keynesianism’. The wheels coming off this wagon will spells the end of the model that has dominated recent decades, and the fall in the average standard of living will be noticeable.

But in order to reverse inequality at a time of economic contraction will require Miliband’s Labour to boldly go where New Labour never went before, and develop policies that implement another word that Mandelson tried to expunge from the party’s vocabulary: redistribution.

Yes, I have heard the argument that Gordon Brown masterminded a strategy dubbed ‘redistribution by stealth’. But in the end, the Gini coefficient doesn’t lie, and it is indisputable that inequality continued to grow between 1997 and 2010.

It might be that Miliband is thinking along redistribution lines, with references to ‘tax and benefit fairness’. But such terminology is so vague that even that is not a given.

Finally, he describes his ultimate goal as ‘more prosperous capitalism’. What the Labour leader should not forget is that capitalism is as prosperous as it ever has been for those at the top.

If he wants to convince the Squeezed Middle that things will be different under a Miliband government, the issue of redistribution is not one that can be fudged indefinitely.