The first is the Labour leadership's central claim that nothing was wrong with Britain's model of economic growth before the crisis and nobody was warning about a 'structural' hole in the public finances. Yet last month the IMF revealed that under Ed Balls's guidance the Treasury repeatedly attempted to silence IMF criticism of the UK's structural deficit. You can't attempt to silence something that doesn't exist.
And you can't silence the OECD, which said that the UK's structural deficit went from second best in the G7 in 2000 to the worst in 2007. Britain's own independent IFS – the Institute for Fiscal Studies – put it bluntly: 'Labour entered the current crisis with one of the largest structural budget deficits in the industrial world.' Even Tony Blair has now admitted that 'from 2005 onwards Labour was insufficiently vigorous in limiting or eliminating the potential structural deficit'. If the current Labour leadership won't even admit the basic errors of the past, why should voters believe that it wouldn't repeat them?
Here's contradiction number two: the Labour leadership claims it would stick to Alistair Darling's plan to halve the deficit in four years, but day after day it opposes the spending cuts that requires. The Darling plan contains £14bn of cuts this coming financial year – just £2bn less than our plan. Yet with just five weeks to go until April we know everything about the cuts Labour opposes but nothing about the cuts it supports.
When pushed for alternatives, Labour's only answer is that by taxing the banks more it could avoid the cuts. Set aside the fact that our permanent £2.5bn bank levy raises more this year than the net £2.3bn raised by Labour's bonus tax last year, even after accounting for the 1p reduction in corporation tax in April. Set aside also the inconvenient truth that Darling himself says a repeat of his bonus tax wouldn't work.
What would Labour spend the bank tax money on? It has spent the same money more than 10 times over: on capital spending, child benefit for the better off, tax credits and avoiding the VAT rise, to name just four examples. And this weekend Balls spent the same money yet again on fuel tax cuts. So we have a tax Darling says would not work, has been spent more than 10 times over, and not a penny has been used to reduce the deficit. That does not constitute a credible policy.
Contradiction number three: Labour's leadership claims we are dealing with their deficit for ideological reasons, but funnily it doesn't accuse the organisations who support our approach of a similar motive. The pace of the government's plan is backed by, among others, the G20, OECD, IMF and European commission – and at home, the CBI, IFS and two of the three main political parties. That doesn't look like an ideological line-up to me. Quite the reverse: it is close to a domestic and international consensus.
Until last week Balls tried to cite the US as a counter-example. That was until treasury secretary Tim Geithner publicly backed our 'very good' strategy while pointing out that we are dealing with a problem we inherited. It is true that because of the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency, the US can increase its deficit this year without fear of a sovereign debt crisis and rising interest rates – an option sadly not available to us. But from next year the budget plan just announced by President Obama actually cuts the deficit faster than our plan.
Where does all this leave Ed Miliband's newfound enthusiasm for the 'squeezed middle'? Let's pass over his failure in every interview to define it – his last effort included around 90% of taxpayers. Where we can all agree is that these are difficult times for family incomes. There are two root causes. One is global: rises in food and commodity prices. The other is specific to the UK: the unwinding, through a 25% currency depreciation and an unavoidable fiscal consolidation, of economic imbalances built up under Labour. That is why the governor of the Bank of England has said that 'the real consequences of this crisis are only now beginning to be felt'.
My party learned the hard way over 13 years that opposition without a credible alternative tends to remain just that: opposition. The real squeeze is not on the middle, but on Labour's muddle.