“David, what have I done to David?” Ed Miliband asked his campaign manager after he had learned that he had just beaten his brother to win the Labour Party leadership election on Saturday. Profuse expressions of fraternal love from both brothers followed.

Then in his main speech on Tuesday, the new Labour leader gave his real answer by denouncing the Iraq war. It was an easy position for the younger Miliband to take as he only entered parliament in 2005, so hadn’t been put in the awkward position of having to vote for it before he was against it. The elder brother’s face froze. Not only had David voted for it, whatever private qualms he might have had about the original decision, as foreign secretary for three and a half years, it was his job to defend it. Having beaten David to the leadership of their party, younger brother Ed was now driving him out of front-line politics altogether.

But now that he’s won the leadership, Ed Miliband faces a handicap. He declared himself the candidate of change—he made the point six times in his short acceptance speech on Saturday—but won as the candidate of continuity, appealing to Labour members who saw the Blair years as some kind of aberration.

Whereas David Cameron and Tony Blair defined their leadership bids as challenges to their parties’ settled beliefs, Mr. Miliband used the route previously taken by Harold Wilson in the 1960s and Neil Kinnock in the 1980s, of appealing to the Left to become Labour leader. With his brother having the support of leading Blairites, he had little choice if he was serious about winning. His victory was not, the press was told, a lurch to the Left. But pictures of Neil Kinnock unable to contain his joy and the quiet satisfaction of the trade union dinosaurs who had given Mr. Miliband his margin of victory told a different story.

For most of the voters whose support Labour needs to win, the unions are relics from a bygone era. Having shown ruthlessness, Mr. Miliband now needs to display some courage. On Wednesday he began to put a little distance, one might say a milimeter, between himself and the trade unions bosses, saying he would not support “irresponsible” strikes but in the next breath condemned businesses that don’t pay what he called a “living wage” while paying their bosses too much. “The happiest societies are the most equal societies,” Labour’s new leader added.

Mr. Miliband acknowledged that Labour had to regain the fiscal credibility it had lost, but he didn’t tell his party the scale of that task. In Britain, government spending under Labour rose more than in any other OECD country, jumping, as a proportion of GDP, by 15.9 percentage points between 2000 and 2010. That exceeds the pace in percentage points of government-spending growth in Ireland (15.5), Portugal (7.9), Spain (6.6) or Greece (2.1). Britain even outpaced the U.S. under Presidents Bush and Obama, where government spending as a percentage of GDP rose only by 7.7 percentage points in the last decade.

Labour politicians’ denial of their fiscal irresponsibility runs deep. Ed Balls, another leadership contender who had worked for Gordon Brown in the Treasury, said in a widely praised speech that the deficit was not Labour’s fault. Yes, Labour borrowed to invest over the last decade, Mr. Balls admitted, only going on to claim that there had not been any significant structural deficit until tax revenues from financial services collapsed in 2008. In fact in his last budget in 2007, Mr. Brown was running a 2.5% deficit at the very top of the cycle before the banking crisis struck when there should have been surpluses.

Labour ran out of steam when it ran out of money. But Mr. Miliband has sought to fashion a narrative explaining Labour’s May election defeat—the worst ever suffered by a governing party—in terms of losing trust and becoming the party of the establishment. All this has given a boost to the new governing coalition. The need to reduce the deficit unites its Conservative and Liberal Democrat partners and is accepted by the public for the time being. It is fortunate for Labour that the coalition agreement precludes Mr. Cameron from calling a snap election.

If the coalition runs to its full term, in 2015 the electorate will most likely make its judgment on the state of the economy rather than on Mr. Miliband’s abandonment of Blairite centrism. The political need for New Labour has gone. New Labour was created in reaction to Conservative election victories that were based on making tax cuts a clear dividing line between Left and Right. But when last week a senior politician attacked capitalism for taking no prisoners and markets for being irrational, it was not a Labour politician but Vince Cable, the coalition’s business secretary. The dividing lines have all but disappeared, making it harder to define someone like Ed Miliband as way to the left of the mainstream.

In 1970, after a more successful stewardship of the economy than the Blair/Brown government—the Labour chancellor at the time, Roy Jenkins, left with the budget in surplus—Labour lurched to the left in opposition. This didn’t prevent Labour coming back to power in 1974 after the Heath government lost control of the economy.

Britain’s governing coalition today is tied to the mast of its plans to cut government spending, which have yet to be decided let alone implemented. But pledges to preserve spending on health care and overseas aid increase the risk that the cuts won’t be delivered in full because it would mean very severe squeezes on spending by other ministries.

Monetary policy is also flashing danger signs. Near-zero interest rates, negative real interest rates, and inflation chronically above target indicate the depth of the Bank of England’s concerns about economic prospects which a capitalist economy cannot sustain indefinitely. No one knows what the state of the economy will be in four years’ time. But there is one hard conclusion that can be drawn from Mr. Miliband’s win: The center of gravity of British politics has shifted leftward.

Mr. Darwall’s book, “Global Warming: A Short History,” is being published by Quartet Books next year.

Since 9/11, Australians have proven themselves once more to be “very satisfactory friends in peace, and the best of friends in war,” as President John Kennedy described them in 1962, attesting to “this happy relationship between two great people.” According to Prime Minister John Howard, “Australians have never asked others to do for us what we have been unwilling to do for ourselves.” But Australia’s participation in the coalition would not have been possible had Howard not won a political debate that consumed much of the 1990s about Australia’s place in the world and its national identity — and, having won power in 1996, had he not demonstrated in government that an instinctively conservative politician can govern successfully in accordance with his principles.

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As the catharsis of electoral rejection gives way to the long march of opposition, Republicans might reflect on the experience of Britain’s Conservative party, which in 1997 suffered its worst poll defeat since 1832. Two further defeats followed. By the next election, due by June 2010, the Conservatives will have been out of office longer than they have been at any time since the middle of the 19th century.

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As double acts go, the names of Marx and ­Engels don’t have quite the ring of Bonnie and Clyde or Laurel and Hardy, but ­celebrity wasn’t ever the point. Revolution was.

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At the conclusion Thursday of the last party conference season before next year’s general election, David Cameron, leader of Britain’s Conservative party, had every right to be encouraged. The media are treating Mr. Cameron as the prime minister-elect and Labour’s conference confirmed that the party is stuck with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Labour’s biggest electoral liability.

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Rarely has the Atlantic seemed as wide as when America’s health-care debate provoked a near unanimous response from British politicians boasting of the superiority of their country’s National Health Service. Prime Minister Gordon Brown used Twitter to tell the world that the NHS can mean the difference between life and death. His wife added, “we love the NHS.” Opposition leader David Cameron tweeted back that his plans to outspend Labour showed the Conservatives were more committed to the NHS than Labour.

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Keynesians howled last week when Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, announced his intention to shrink the budget deficit by more than the previous Labour government. The fiscal squeeze would plunge Britain into a 1930s-style depression. Where would demand come from with the rest of the world limping out of recession? Mr. Osborne’s Labour predecessor joined the chorus, suggesting that for all his plans to cut public spending if Labour had won the election, Alistair Darling would always have found excuses for delay.

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Tomorrow’s British election is on course to be only the third time in 31 years that the country has changed its government. Margaret Thatcher swept the Conservatives into power in 1979 and Tony Blair ushered in a period of Labour Party control in 1997. Yet an election that to many appeared a certain victory for David Cameron and the Conservatives turned out to be an unexpected roller coaster of a ride.

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