To look to the future, perhaps we need to recover some of the spirit of the past.

The traditional aspirations of social democracy have been the eradication of inequality, the taming of the power of capital, and the subordination of the profit motive to democratic and popular control of the economy.

In the British Labour Party there were many different interpretations of these goals, and a division arose between the traditionalists, who wanted to see the economy substantially state controlled, and the revisionists, who questioned whether the goals of eradicating inequality necessarily required widespread nationalisation. Nevertheless, the whole party, and the wider movement, retained its broadly social-democratic character. How was that shared sense of vision lost?

Recently, centre-left Labour MP Jon Cruddas has written of the party’s loss of what he describes as Anthony Crosland’s model of social democracy. Jon wrote: ‘The Future of Socialism (1956) was for many of us always out there on the horizon – a revisionist answer to orthodox Marxism whilst also an assault on the foundations of market economics’ neo-classical theory. It was an intellectual cornerstone for a social democracy built on tax receipts from capitalist progress, an interventionist nation state and class reconciliation through growth.’

But Crosland’s vision was based upon an assumption that the capitalist economic system had stabilised, and the task of government was to manage away inequality in conditions of prosperity. The stagnation of the Wilson years and the economic crisis of the 1970s raised questions that Crosland and his co-thinkers had no answers to.

In the absence of such a vision or any alternative, the traditional Labourist arguments for retaining and increasing a major role for the state in the economy have too often been tied to anachronistic iconography, and nostalgia for forms of working-class life that no longer existed. This has meant that in the internal politics of the Labour Party the alternative economic policies that rejected neoliberalism were linked with a lack of modernity, and with the aura of past elections lost.

Yet the liberalisation that has led to the privatisation of most of the British state’s stake in the economy has little to offer. It has left the government with very few levers to intervene; and it has also provided an ideological tilt towards the finance sector, which in turn has further encouraged the regional inequality whereby the South East of England has prospered at the expense of the other nations of the UK, and of the English regions.

In contrast, Brazil has been able to use substantial state investment in public infrastructure works to make an early return to economic growth; and China has been able to use its still significant state holdings to direct productive investment to avoid the worst effects of the recession.

Social democracy needs to recover its sense of vision, and that means recovering our confidence that the people can exercise democratic control of the economy through the state.

We do need to modernise. The common lifestyle of working-class people of yesteryear has been fractured into a myriad subcultures, and the traditional icons of Labourism can today struggle to make a connection. The great strides that have been made in removing the old class barriers and snobberies have opened up new forms of inequality, which are in many ways even more intractable, and to which there are few easy answers. But ‘modernisation’ must cease to be a euphemism for neglecting our core aims and values.

One answer is to be found in the social-democratic nature of trade unions. These are inherently modern institutions, which have to perpetually persuade ordinary people to voluntarily pay cold hard cash to retain their membership. Trade unions are close to the day to day concerns of working people, and need to talk to them through language and imagery that relates to the modern reality of work. The social mission of trade unions is also centred on the interests of their members as human beings. And we need to recover the idea that the success of our society should be measured not in dollars, or Euros or percentage profits, but by how well society satisfies the desires of all its citizens and participants.

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