And in that bitterly cold January week, when both Nick Clegg and David Cameron jostled to set out their own responses to that agenda, Goldman Sachs, with a characteristically thoughtful PR display, announced that it had set aside £8bn in staff bonus pay for 2011. For many, this encapsulated the amorality of contemporary capitalism, a system where a tiny majority are allowed to bask in untrammelled wealth whilst the majority endure hardship.

It is far too early to tell whether such talk represents the beginning of a revival in the Left’s political fortunes- although the electoral fortunes of the increasingly emboldened Socialist Party in France and the Obama administration in the US should give us a clearer indication later this year- and a reversal of the post-crash dynamic where, despite the implicit repudiation of neoliberal economics it carried, Europe emphatically turned to a resurgent Right.

There are clear dangers for the Labour Party should it intend on issuing a premature declaration of victory. We should not delude ourselves into thinking that the public’s anger at bankers’ bonuses equates to support for overzealous intervention into the private sector.  Neither should we think that the unravelling of the Government’s austerity plan will automatically translate into a boost to our own economic credibility. Historically, in the 1930s and the 1980s, the Conservatives won elections, despite presiding over faltering economies, by claiming relative rather than absolute competence; that under Labour things would be far worse.

Ominously, this line of attack does not depend on any objective economic measures of success. So paradoxically, when, as seems inevitable, the Government miss their target of eradicating the structural deficit within this Parliamentary session, their mismanagement may even play into their hands unless we have sufficiently restored our own economic credibility.  Demonstrating fiscal responsibility, that we have learnt that there is nothing progressive about wasting money on debt repayments that could be spent on hospitals and schools, is the starting point for any road back to power.

And yet, there is unmistakably a whiff of 1945 or 1979 about the current debate; that we are in fact witnessing the collapse in support for an entire political economic orthodoxy. It is to the task of developing a new consensus, one that embodies Ed Miliband’s idea of ‘responsible capitalism’, that we must all turn our attention to.

But this challenge is just as profound for the Labour movement as it is for any other political party. For our hitherto dominant Croslandite model, that the best way of advancing social justice is through accepting free market capitalism tout court and redistributing the proceeds of a supposedly ‘perpetual’ growth, stretched to its limits by New Labour, has run its course. That is not to denigrate the achievements of New Labour or to call into question the undoubted positive impact that using the proceeds of the profound 10 years of growth had in the total reconstruction of the public realm. But there was undeniably an overreliance on redistribution as the only way of creating a fairer society.

When developing our new political economy we must look at the structure of the model itself and the way in which the market distributes its rewards in the first place. The American political scientist, Jacob S. Hacker has called this approach ‘pre-distribution’ and it is this mentality that should guide us in shaping our new political economy.

Of course, only two years into an electoral cycle, with the economic outlook far from clear, and half-way through the first policy review for nearly 18 years, it would be wrong for Labour to be offering a comprehensive policy platform at this stage. But there are two main areas that I think should be the focus of our attention.

First, Labour needs to talk openly about how it would rebalance the economy away from its sectoral and regional imbalances. Our economy is far too geared towards the service sector, particularly financial services, whilst investment is concentrated too highly in already affluent areas, particularly the South East. A greater focus on manufacturing is needed and sustainable, inclusive, regional growth is needed.

It is startling to hear the fatalism espoused by many economic commentators with regard to British manufacturing – one would certainly not imagine that we are still the 6^th largest manufacturing economy in the world. And yet to maintain this position in an increasingly competitive global marketplace requires active government support and intervention. We can no longer be queasy about encouraging regional specialisation or ‘picking winners’: in a globalised world no government can be ambivalent about the means by which wealth is created. Capital allowances for manufacturing, targeted research and development grants and support for energy-intensive industries, currently under real threat of offshoring due to the Government’s short-sighted unilateral carbon price floor, would all help. After all, it makes no environmental sense either to export jobs to areas where processes are more carbon intensive and less energy inefficient, only to reimport the carbon back.

However, perhaps the biggest idea in this space and one that could give a much needed boost to short-term growth is to create a state-backed regional investment bank. There are a bewildering amount of tiny regional funding streams available to business; rolling these up into a larger investment vehicle, which offered longer tenors that the commercial market, could issue geographically constrained ‘municipal bonds’ and, crucially, had an acute understanding of the local business environment would give the current strategies for regional growth far more visibility and clout.

The second area is to catalyse the co-operative, mutual and employee-owned sector within the private sector.  Because very often we find at the heart of our established business culture, indeed the structure of the entire existing economic system, a set of perverse incentives that encourage short-termism and a focus on maximising immediate financial returns to the detriment of long term value creation. Mutual models on the other hand understand that it is personal relationships that make the difference; that the more they empower their staff by giving them a stake in the business, the more likely they are to be engaged, efficient and innovative.  In a recession, the importance of these relationships is starkly emphasised: between 2007 and 2009 the Co-operative economy grew a staggering 24.6% at a time when the rest of the economy contracted by 1.8%.

This success or even merely the viability of the mutual option needs to be far better disseminated and Government should take a leading role in championing the sector. Lawyers, accountants, financial advisers and banks must understand how employee-owned businesses work and what their needs are. One potential recommendation is a ‘single-route’ to mutual businesses, a defined legal structure that could provide clarity to the market. I am also struck by the idea of having designated urban clusters of employee ownership as, with the rebirth of the ceramics sector in Stoke-on-Trent, I have seen the importance of horizontal collaboration in growing specialised economic hubs.

With their emphasis on sustainability, accountability and responsibility for your fellow employee, private sector mutual can play a pivotal role to play in rebalancing our economy in a more responsible direction; of allying the innovation stimulated by open, competitive markets, with a sense of responsibility and respect for society.

It is around these values upon which we must found our new political economy.

Michael Dugher has been the Labour MP for Barnsley East since 2010, but his experience in British politics reaches much further back. He worked at 10 Downing Street as the Chief Political Spokesman for Gordon Brown, as well as an adviser to the Department of Transport, Local Government and Regional Affairs and Ministry of Defence, Leader of the House of Commons and the Government Chief Whip. In 2010 he became the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition, before joining the Shadow Cabinet in 2011 without portfolio. He is now responsible for coordinating attacks between departments on the government.

We arrived at Portcullis House for the interview and the suits took us up to his office. This is located in the old Scotland Yard building, down the road from the Palace of Westminster: thousands of interrogations must have taken place here, but we didn’t aim to follow their lead. Instead, we wanted to have a conversation, and yet still ask robust and challenging questions.  As we sat down, Mr Dugher asked his aide for a KitKat and a cup of tea- shows where your first class degree in politics can get you. As he sat down and started eating his chocolate, we asked him about the polls…

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Gordon Brown’s premiership was by no means perfect. Running a deficit in times of relative prosperity was a loose interpretation of his ‘golden rule’ and made it politically and financially difficult to argue for a Keynesian economic stimulus in the wake of the recession. However, Mr Brown’s leadership in pushing for a worldwide stimulus package has been praised by economists and politicians alike, and helped prevent the crisis quickly developing into something far worse. It was much commented at the time- although largely forgotten now- that the government’s response to the recession meant that it had had a peculiarly soft impact on the ordinary person, with most keeping their jobs.

How different things are under our current government. David Cameron and George Osborne’s conviction that they can cut spending and jobs whilst investing next to nothing in the economy and rely on a miracle of Biblical proportions to ensure growth is rapidly unravelling before our eyes. In the United States where a Brown-inspired stimulus programme has largely been followed through, they are seeing a return to moderate economic growth. At home, where Mr Osborne promised us that ‘savage cuts’ (to use Mr Clegg’s rather too gleeful wording) to many of the things we hold dear were the only way to escape recession, we see ourselves heading back into recession, poverty and further social strife.

Big problems call for big ideas, and the Labour Party must not shy away from them. Britain’s first requirement is a strong economy. Look after the pounds and, to some extent, the people will look after themselves. New Labour got it right by saying that in order to redistribute wealth we have to have wealth to redistribute, and in order to have wealth we have to have a strong economy. However, New Labour assumed that the best way to distribute the nation’s wealth fairly was by encouraging neo-liberal no-holds-barred capitalism, run by those we see drinking Goldschläger and abusing lap dancers every evening in the City of London. We would then cream off some of the profit in taxes which could be redistributed as benefits and tax credits. Whilst this was preferable to the Thatcherite assertion that if we allow the rich to become filthy rich some of their wealth will ‘trickle down’ to the rest of society, it is a policy which has clearly failed. We know that most like feeling that they have earned their income through work rather than received it as a state handout. It is by mobilizing this sort of logic, and turning those with more stable incomes against those more reliant on state help, characterized as ‘benefit scroungers’, that the government is able to push through its insidious benefit cuts that will have the main effect of hurting the poorer and more vulnerable in our society. We may not like it, but it is working for them.

What Britain needs, therefore, is threefold: economic prosperity to create wealth, near-full employment to distribute it in a transparently fair manner without allowing the Right to take money away from the poor under the pretence of ‘fairness’, and reasonable wages to ensure that this distribution takes place in a way that ensures as much equality as is possible under a capitalist system.

The question of reasonable wages is fairly simple. It has widely been shown that the best way to encourage fair wages is trade unionism. Some argue that the militancy of the 1970s did more harm in the long-term than it did good, but it is clear that the situation we have now has gone far too far the other way: a vast number of non-unionised people are in jobs paid so poorly they cannot afford to live without additional employment or substantial assistance. The Labour Party must promote a reasonable and robust trade unionism which includes the majority of the workforce. The current leadership’s deliberately ambiguous attitude is not helpful.

Economic prosperity and job creation are more complicated, but can and must be tackled together. The economy needs a stimulus. Refusing to intervene in the economy is not working. It is not what our competitors do. Moreover, what stimulus this government has allowed- predominantly through the Bank of England’s ‘quantitative easing’- has patently failed. What is needed is substantial direct investment in selected industries. In order to provide jobs these should be industries which employ large numbers of people. These have become dirty subjects in recent decades. We cannot be sentimental about old industries which are unlikely to be profitable, but there are many things that Britain does well, and profitably. We are very good at manufacturing cars and aeroplanes. Britain has ideal facilities- knowledge, infrastructure and location- for shipbuilding, but the industry has declined so significantly thanks to successive governments’ refusal to support it against competition from countries in the Far East, who recognize the potential of state-supported shipyards in providing rapid and strong economic growth. A strong industrial policy is not a new idea, but the rhetoric must be backed up with hard cash. Britain is not a poor country. We can, and must, mobilize the capital required to follow this kind of revived industrial policy. Mr Osborne himself has shown us one possibility for where this could come from in his attempts to persuade pension funds (and the Chinese) to invest in this country’s ageing infrastructure.

This two-fold solution of promoting trades unions and investment in mass-employing industry is big idea which will take guts, skill and a lot of persuasion. However, it is necessary. The current government claims that there is no alternative to the bitter pill they are in the process of feeding the nation. But the medicine is not working. This idea is the alternative, and there seems to me to be no other option unless we are to accept terminal decline, poverty and inequality. It is an idea based on principles and policies which are by no means alien to the Labour Movement.

At the same time as this upper echelon, the ‘1%’, dominates society, the working class continue to pay a disproportionate price of the failure of the economic system which creates wealth for the top 1%. It is they who will bear the highest burden of the cuts, it is they who cannot afford homes as not enough are built, and it is they who, according to Owen Jones, are being demonized. The poorest half of society, 50% of people, own only 7% of total wealth. Class consciousness and self-identification may have declined, but economically a significant portion of the population belongs to a group whose opportunities are significantly worse than those at the top.

Even the policies of the Labour government of 1945-1951 failed to address this, there may have been a post-war consensus of nationalised industries and a cradle to grave welfare state, but the class system remained, and has remained, broadly the same in economic terms. It is changing this, and hence the fundamental nature of how the British economy works, which should be Labour’s goal.

How is it to be done? Nationalised industries have already been mentioned as not having changed the class system, but they provide one vital part. To have a host of public services, including transport, utilities, banking, green industry and education, fully owned by the state, with outsourcing not done to private companies, will reduce the profit and wealth-retaining properties of the top, and provide employment opportunities for the rest, on Living Wages, decent pensions and industrial democracy. However, where the Labour governments of the post-war period went wrong is not matching this nationalised ‘towering heights’ with a fundamentally changed business model for the rest. We need fewer global chains, not paying Living Wages and in many cases not at all (Workfare, unpaid internships), and more businesses owned as co-operatives, whether consumer like the Co-operative group, or worker, like John Lewis Partnership, but going further where the business is ran by and for the benefit of all of its employers rather than a board of directors. Trade unions formed a vital part of the economic structure of the country prior to Thatcher, ensuring that worker’s wages remained high, reducing income inequality and boosting consumption, and it is the destruction and demonization of the movement, failed to be reversed by Blair and Brown, which has led to the widening income inequality of this country as unionisation, particularly in the private sector, plummets and employment relations are such that companies take on temps, short-contract workers, and outsource to low-paid employers in developing countries, giving little scope for unionisation and job safety for many people. Technological development has advanced rapidly in the last couple of decades, but this has been for the benefit of increasingly large global companies rather than for the benefit of the people. Innovation in certain sectors, particularly renewable energies and the car industry has been held back by the vested interests of a few. There is great scope for research and development to forge a new economy based on green industry supported by state-owned businesses and investment banks. Tinkering with the market to incentivise carbon reduction has not worked, only a change of the economic model itself will bring about the necessary reductions. Taxes need to be rebalanced away from the dangerous trend towards indirect taxes and back to direct, with regressive VAT reduced, the higher rate of income tax raised and more bands created to ensure the new ‘super-rich’, for whom £150,000 is a drop in the pond, pay a fair share, and the ending of the current situation which sees the highest-earners pay very little marginal national insurance, making their marginal tax rates in many cases lower than those earning much less. Taxing wealth is hard, but possible through some kind of Mansion Tax which targets those who own significant property.

It is only really by fundamentally altering the model of the British economy, away from the consensus of neo-liberal capitalism which perpetuates the inequitable class system described above, and towards the kind of economy based on the principles of Democratic Socialism where there are public services and industries which are for the benefit of the people, where business is not ran for the shareholders and board-managers but for its workers and benefit of society, where trade unions and industrial democracy form a vital part of each workplace, where green industry is promoted and technological development for the benefit of all encouraged, and where the tax system is such that it changes the burden to increase the freedom of the working class and place the burden on those who have taken, but who now must pay.

This edition of Look Left is supposed to be about big ideas. Rather than proposing one, I am suggesting that we look more critically at an idea which has been gaining ground on the political left for the last forty years. Most people who describe themselves as ‘Green’ are simply identifying with a moderate environmentalism which aims to conserve the natural environment and to bring carbon emissions to sustainable levels. This is all very well, as far as it goes, but we must be careful.

In the first place, hardcore environmentalism is a political dead end. The impressive results of Green parties, in Germany for instance, should not deceive us. The majority of voters won over to Green parties are either protest voters who don’t fancy the far right, or Nimbies. The kind of anti-growth policies advocated by hardcore Greens, if adopted by Labour, would lead inexorably to electoral oblivion; the 1950s and the 1980s taught us what happens if the Tories are seen as the party of affluence. Ultimately people have contradictory wishes, they want to see the environment protected and they want to consume more. Clearly we have to strike a balance, but if we move too far away from a vision of rising living standards the electorate will punish us, and rightly so. We need to paint a hopeful and optimistic picture of social and economic progress; a little ‘grace and gaiety’ as well as clean-living virtue.

Green parties and organizations, partly because of the unreconstructed radicalism of their leaderships and partly because of their willingness to play on people’s fears, tend to lead governments to outrageous and often regressive decisions. The German government’s decision to abandon nuclear power, under electoral pressure from the Green party, is utterly self-defeating from an environmental perspective; it ensures nothing except that Germany will fall short of international emissions standards. One of the great unsung heroes of the twentieth century was Norman Borlaug (a name which may sound familiar to viewers of The West Wing). He developed a mutant, high-yielding strain of wheat which was adopted in South Asia and other famine-ridden regions and is credited with saving more than a billion people worldwide from death by starvation. Genetic modification could yield many such life-saving and life-enhancing innovations but the absurd cult of the ‘precautionary principle’ means that GMOs are banned despite there being no evidence that they are harmful. In a world governed according to Green dogma Borlaug’s wheat would have been suppressed, and environmentalists’ concerns would have been spared at the cost of a sixth of the world’s population.

Greens will tell you that the world has changed. Continuous economic expansion used to be acceptable, but now we know its effects surely it cannot continue. Tell that to China or any of the other developing countries. We must accept the inevitable: the climate will warm up, the human population will explode and natural resources will become scarce. In a world like that we need a government which vigorously defends Britain’s interests, which fights to secure sensible and truly international regulation on the environment, workers’ rights and other issues, and which is ready to intervene abroad to protect those caught up in what promises to be a century even more unstable than the last. We can do none of these things if we voluntarily cripple our economy through over-regulation.

Time and again, we have politicians and opinion formers justifying budget cuts with recourse to the wee bairns in their beds. Remember the ‘Dad’s nose, Mum’s eye’s, Gordon Brown’s debt’ poster of January 2009? How about Nick Clegg in June 2010, arguing that ‘there is nothing progressive about condemning ourselves and our children to decades of debt’. Fraser Nelson, in the Spectator expressed it thus: ‘debt is nothing more than delayed taxation. To saddle the next generation with billions upon billions of debt is not just an economic failure, but a moral failure’.

The Labour party cannot allow the Coalition to take ownership of IE claims. First things first, there’s the internal inconsistency of appealing to generational equity in order to justify the government’s spending plans which have hit young people with disproportionate savagery. ‘Moral failure’, Mr Nelson? Tell that to the million or so unemployed 16-24 year-olds. Furthermore, in allowing the Tories to successfully twin the language of IE to their deficit reduction strategy, the left has missed a trick.  For what IE is really about is redistribution.

As class arguably loses salience at the ballot, we have a emerging cleavage of haves and have-nots split across generational lines.  Baby boomers, have and their children have-not.

As Will Hutton, principal of Hertford College and former Chief Executive of the Work Foundation, noted: ‘having enjoyed a life of free love, free school meals, free universities, defined benefit pensions, mainly full employment and a 40-year-long housing boom, [the baby boomers] are bequeathing their children sky-high house prices, debts and shrivelled pensions. A 60 year-old today is a very privileged and lucky human being’.

The facts speak for themselves. More than 80% of the nation’s £6.7trn in wealth is owned by baby boomers. Collectively, the country owns £2.6trn in shares and savings – and those aged 50 to 64 own £1trn of this. Much of the baby boomer wealth is tied up in property, 83% of which is owned by people over the age of 45.  Compare this to the under 35s and that figure is just 5%. Not only did our parents have the ‘good sense’ to buy cheap property, sit back and live in it, while its value soared, but one in five baby boomers now owns a second home, excluding young people from the market and feathering their nests with ever greater pots cash.

If we consider this alongside the OECD report from May last year which  predicted that by 2050, Britain will have to spend £80 billion per year above what it does now on pensions, long-term elderly care and the NHS, making the cost of the ageing population ten times that of the financial crisis. How this will be paid is no surprise.  Diana Coyle writes in The Economics of Enough ‘future taxpayers will be paying a higher share of their incomes to their governments for a lower entitlement to services and benefits from their governments’. It is difficult not to think that we are being shafted by what Lord Lipsey calls ‘a transfer of wealth on an unparalleled scale to older people’.

Any immediate solution to this intergenerational shafting must centre on housing. Here, the policy debate is burgeoning. The Intergenerational Foundation’s report into the crisis in the housing market Hoarding of Housing caused a stir at the end of last year by highlighting the 25 million empty bedrooms in Britain caused by baby boomers’ longevity and their refusals to downsize. It is time to start talking sensibly about a radical inheritance tax, regardless of the right-wing press screaming about death taxes.

Once upon a time Labour was the party of redistributive justice. In the post-war era we concerned ourselves with the glaring iniquities of wealth, bound up in the estates of merchants and aristocrats. Just as we once fought iniquity based on class, we must rage against its emergence between the generations. In the post-war years the fight for economic justice was over property ownership, and it lies at the heart of the problem now.

In truth, there are politicians across the spectrum who are thinking seriously about these issues. First amongst them is David Willets whose book The Pinch, argues that tensions between the generations will be the defining political cleavage in the decades to come. There are mutterings on these questions from all sides. It is paramount that Labour act now to prevent our opposition from claiming IE as a Conservative policy area whilst twinning it to regressive economics.

Labour needs to be bold. We are the party of redistributive fairness; we are the natural bedfellows of intergenerational equity. Labour, and particularly young Labour, must rearticulate its claims about economic justice to encompass this emergent dimension, because this time, it’s generational.

Obviously, it’s not quite as simple as that; but it is the first step to getting back to power and being able to implement all the ideas this issue shows we have no shortage of. It’s also something which sounds deceptively easy; of course we all want to win elections, right? Everybody wants to win elections; even the Liberal Democrats allegedly want to win elections, however much they may act as though that’s not the case.

But of course, we know that’s not true. There are lots of people within the Labour Party who don’t want to win an election- or rather, to be fair, they want to win an election, but they don’t think that it’s our main goal. Or they think it’ll just happen if we focus on other things. Our main goal, they say, should be to defend people’s living standards, or to defend the NHS, or to prevent Tory cuts from hitting the most vulnerable. And of course all of those are at the heart of who we are- but none of them can be accomplished until we win an election.

The hard truth is that there is nothing that we can do in Opposition. Contrary to what some have said, we can’t ‘frame’ the debate; governments and circumstances frame debates. Oppositions take advantage of them. Ed handled the hacking crisis brilliantly- but it was not because he drove the narrative or ‘framed’ the debate. The Guardian did that; what Ed did was seize the opportunity. And the reality is that this is the best that any Opposition can hope to accomplish. Ultimately, there are only two ways we can do anything outside Government: we can work to ensure a future Labour government will be elected to accomplish our aims, and we can fight in local councils and regional assemblies to do the best we can- both of which require elections to be won.

The problem is; really wanting to win an election is hard. We only need to look at the past to see that. After our previous periods in government, in 1951 and in 1979, we just waited for government to drop back into our laps again; we didn’t work to modernise, to change ourselves, or to really understand what the electorate wanted. And both times, of course, we deluded ourselves into believing that what the electorate did want was the same as what the party grass-roots wanted, that the centre-ground had been shifted leftwards- a mistake that it seems all too possible that we will repeat in 2012.

We won an election in 1997 after we had become so utterly sick of irrelevance- and that is what Opposition is- that nothing could prevent us from changing. It was not just at the leadership level that this was true but across the party; from Scotland to Kent, we were determined to finally put ourselves back in Number 10, where we belong. And in doing so, we finally did what all the voters who supported us through the dark days of the 1980s had put their faith in us to do.

When we do not commit ourselves 100% to winning the next election, it isn’t us who suffers. Yes, it’s true that if we lose in 2015, then every person in this Club will be about thirty years old the next time we win an election. That is a long time to be irrelevant. But more importantly, think of what will happen to the country after it has had a Tory government for that long- and think above all of the poorest and most vulnerable, those we claim to represent. If we truly believe that we are the best party to help those people, then we have a moral duty to them to leave no stone unturned in our effort to win the next election and return to a position where we can do so.

The Labour Party has had seventeen Leaders in its history, not counting temporary leaders; of them, exactly three have won majorities in a General Election. One has won more than one full term. We cannot afford to let this pattern continue- and more importantly, the people who we represent cannot afford it. To indulge ourselves in the selfishness of righteously indignant Opposition is a betrayal of ordinary people across our country. We have done it far too much before; we cannot do it again.

That is why the single most important big idea we can adopt in Opposition is also the most obvious and perhaps the hardest one of all; we must make it our all-consuming aim to win the next election. Then, and only then, can the real work of helping Britain, and implementing all our other big ideas, finally begin.

After the much-hyped Socialist primaries last year, the glum reality of François Hollande’s Presidential candidacy is beginning to sink in. The former partner of Ségolène Royal looks set to clinch the Presidency, but he has largely missed his opportunity to open a dialogue about France’s future and project any idea of a lasting solution to the long-term economic decline the country now faces.

The Socialist manifesto smacks of a party fighting to govern a nation that has run out of money and run out of ideas, with no overriding vision tying the austere policies together. Hollande has proposed a future jobs fund with a meagre 150,000 posts as the solution to France’s unrelenting youth unemployment problem (hovering between 20% and 25% for the best part of a decade). Coupled with the preservation of the 35-hour working week and the right to retire at 60, the radical and reformist PS of the Mitterand era has long disappeared.

Christened “Monsieur Normal” by the media, Hollande’s “normality” has rendered him increasingly unexciting. As yet another of the middle-aged, white, male species of politician that dominates France, his brand of normality is of the Ed Miliband variety – Hollande is part of France’s political élite as an alumnus of the National School of Administration, and he has spent much of his career within the bosom of the PS. His failure to connect with the real “Monsieur Normal” was sorely highlighted earlier this year. In the bleak banlieue of Le Bourget, he was attacked by a flour-pelting protester who accused Hollande of “rolling France in flour” (pulling a fast one) instead of seeking to solve France’s housing crisis and Paris’ appalling housing conditions, just two examples of crucial national issues that have been largely overlooked by the PS as they seek to widen their appeal by bank-bashing and not saying much else.

Much to the chagrin of many in Europe, a Socialist victory in France will not herald the resurrection of the left across the continent. France’s situation is not unique, but the inevitable Hollande win in April will reflect a discredited UMP and nervousness about the French economy, rather than a national optimism for how the Left can improve Europe’s fate in the age of austerity.

Nevertheless the current political climate, while understandable, threatens to wipe out social issues from the current political scene. I do not think that this is a healthy step for democracy, for even if voters have more homogenous views on social issues it should still be up to the parties to show the electorate how their policies would affect social conditions in Britain. The worst-case scenario is, with the public focused on technical differences in economic proposals, regressive social policy is reintroduced under the radar with neither political debate nor public discussion. What is needed is a vision for Labour that includes a recognisable future for our social policy.

There is, however, one vision of Labour’s future that does include a vision for social policy. Unfortunately, it is not a vision that I share or think the party should adopt. I am of course talking about Maurice Glasman’s now infamous “Blue Labour”, with its social ideas based around the trifecta of “family, faith and flag”. Now such an idea has many implications for social policy, but I do not think many of them could be called ‘progressions’ on the current trends of social policy. More worryingly, Glasman’s motto is copied verbatim from the Conservative ‘Cornerstone Group’, a backwards organisation that would relish the chance to launch a wave of socially regressive legislation.

The counterargument to this is that such “social conservatism” simply has popular appeal, and the swing voters that Labour needs to win back hold these kinds of social views. What would the social section of such a manifesto look like? It would be one that included ‘Marriage Incentives’, because when love isn’t enough an extra few pounds a month sure does the trick. It would be a sharp revision downwards of the 24-week abortion limit, along with banning organisations from giving help and advice. It would appeal to ‘religious ethics’ while imposing by statutory means a moral framework upon every individual in this society. That is the intellectual well from which Glasman’s social ideas come, that is what the faux populists would achieve given a free reign.

There are two major issues here. The first is that, aside from partisan leanings and personal beliefs on these issues, social conservatives invariably have to legislate their particular moral frameworks onto those of everybody else, and that sets an extremely dangerous precedent for Government intervention into the private lives of citizens. The second is that these views stand opposed to the ‘march of ideas’. To take one instance, gay marriage will become legal in this country at some point in the future, as the arguments against become increasingly weaker. Few, with the exception perhaps of Nadine Dorries, would say that such legislation would cast the nation into abject moral peril, until eventually the only difference will be that of a name, and finally that too will change. The question now becomes how long are we willing to hold back what is an almost inevitable occurrence.

I do not subscribe to a theory of general decline of Britain or British society. In many areas, such as gay rights, society is immeasurably better and that can be attributed to the reforms that New Labour implemented. But there is a clear issue when it comes to people’s relationships with their fellow citizens and with the state. The Social Attitudes Survey shows worrying trends in public opinion. Across major institutions, the banks, the media, the press and the government, there has been a fall in public trust over the past 30 years. Support for direct government intervention in the distribution of incomes has fallen from 51% in 1991 to 36% today. The public are also not in favour of greater benefit spending (at only 27% support increased spending).  In addition to the loss of trust institutions, across the whole of society, there is growing alienation and a decline in people feeling part of a community. This has helped contribute to certain social ills. 5 Days In August, a report into the summer 2011 riots, showed that in those areas with a similar social makeup to those areas that rioted but where people felt they had a stake in their community, rioting was lower or non-existent. The twin crises of institutional decline and reduced social relations are a problem for the left. Our old top-down, centrally run model is not necessarily appropriate to modern society. A new way needs to be forged.

That new way is to strengthen communities and to reshape our institutions to make this change happen. This means devolving power to communities, so that they can shape the way that their services work for their community. Services can be shaped to the individual needs of a community and retain a collective element. This is not to say that some services should not be personalized or that the public services choice agenda is incompatible with having community-based services. Personalised service should have a community element, be it welfare or health care. After a certain period of time, those on Jobseeker’s Allowance, should have to take part in community work in return for benefits. This should be work that benefits the community and gives skills to those out of work, not the Tory’s failed workfare scheme which acts a subsidy to private sector companies. Institutions need to change and become better suited to including the community.  It is not only through institutions that we can rebuild communities. As community organising has shown, through citizen engagement, we can rekindle the spirit of solidarity across communities and achieve real victories for members of that area. This is not to say that community organising is a silver bullet, only that it should be part of a wider strategy.

Big ideas are supposed to make a radical change and in a way that is what strengthening communities is offering. However, it is also firmly within a very British and very Labour tradition of community and responsibility to our fellow man.  Offering a solution from the radical centre and traditional values in a modern setting, now where have I heard that before?