“Like Thatcher, Miliband has sought to identify a unifying theme to which all Britain’s problems can be related. Where Thatcher chose ‘socialism’, Miliband has opted for ‘responsibility’. The theme has obvious merits … The problem is that it is inherently non-partisan. When Thatcher railed against ‘socialism’, it was obvious that she was talking about Labour. No one on the Conservative benches self-identifies as ‘irresponsible’, and that limits its power as a political weapon. ‘Responsibility’ has no political hook; indeed, if it were to ‘take’ as a theme, there would be nothing to prevent David Cameron from simply co-opting it.”

First, why now?

Many of the Treaties that define the UK’s relationship with the EU were signed by Conservative PMs, e.g. Maastricht Treaty. We didn’t have referendums when these Treaties were signed. Are Conservatives now saying that we should have done? And should now retrospectively do so?

The priority for all MPs and MEPs should now be economic recovery. Almost everything else is a distraction. Resolving the euro-zone crisis would significantly improve the economic prospects of the EU and the UK. This is, therefore, a more pressing issue for debate than whether or not the UK should have a referendum on EU membership.

Second, how do Conservatives propose that the euro-zone crisis be resolved and how would this impact the UK’s relationship with the EU?

The UK’s interests here are: That the euro-zone members find a durable solution to their crisis, while properly allocating responsibility within this solution to EU and euro-zone members and ensuring that the benefits of EU membership continue to be enjoyed by non-euro EU members.

What matters, therefore is: encouraging and supporting euro-zone members to find a durable solution; requiring that euro-zone members properly face up to whatever responsibilities are created for them in this solution; and guaranteeing that this solution does not forego the benefits of EU membership enjoyed by the UK. We, for example, must insist on UK access to and involvement in shaping a deepened single market, even in the context of further consolidation amongst the euro-zone members.

Third, do Conservatives not accept that we should return to this debate on an EU referendum in the UK after these pressing and profound issues with the euro-zone have been properly and fully addressed?

We should be focusing all of our energies on resolving these issues in a durable manner, which protects the UK’s interests, as a non-euro EU member, both in the near and longer-term. It may be that these solutions necessitate changes that are constitutionally significant to the UK. In which case, a referendum would be entirely appropriate. But we are a long way from resolving the euro-zone crisis. Until we get to this stage, all debate about the EU amounts to shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic.

Fourth, why can the Conservatives not work constructively to resolve the euro-zone crisis, instead of re-hashing debates of the 1980s and 1990s?

Let’s return to the here and now, as this could not have more serious questions to answer. These are questions that will impact the incomes and wellbeing of all British citizens. It ill behoves any elected representative to create distractions to the resolution of these questions.

When these questions are resolved, with the euro-zone crisis behind us and the UK’s interests protected, if this resolution has necessitated a constitutionally significant change in the UK’s relationship with the EU, let us then return to this debate on a UK referendum on EU membership.

Blue Labour seems less in fashion than previously. It was never the answer to every challenge facing Labour. But it does have contributions to make to Labour’s renewal. Whatever it is, blue Labour seems defiantly rooted in our country and the traditions which have shaped and continue to comfort and inspire its people. Global and jet-set it isn’t.

It feels odd, therefore, to see the core motivations of a creed as unabashedly Anglo-Saxon as Britpop reflected back in the protests convulsing India and Israel. These protests, like blue Labour, are, fundamentally, about rejecting contemporary materialism for the perceived morality and communality of exalted past eras: the dignity of Gandhi’s India; the solidarity of the Israeli kibbutz; and the warm embrace of the Labour party before the middle class dilettantes stole it from the working class. It’s easy to be cynical. There were, of course, no golden ages. But it’s what blue Labour and the protests say about the present that is most interesting.

Tobias Buck recently observed in the Financial Times that 250,000 Israelis have taken to the streets calling for social reform. He described them as ranging “from students to pensioners, and Holocaust survivors to taxi drivers” and as “perhaps the most serious challenge yet to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu”. He went on: “Many Israelis, regardless of their wealth and social status, say they still long for a return to the years when the country was less materialistic and more egalitarian. Even in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, the ideals of the kibbutz live on”.

Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption protests have evoked the spirit of the independence struggle. Jason Burke explained in the Observer that his “asceticism – he eats yoghurt for breakfast, chapatis and a single portion of vegetables for lunch and has just a glass of lemon juice for dinner – has a deep resonance in a time when unbridled materialism is the dominant social ethic”. The bigger question, according to Burke, that Hazare has posed is: “What is this new India that is being created with its 8% year-on-year economic growth rates”?

The financial crisis brutally forced Iceland to confront its national purpose. Sam Knight wrote of this in August’s Prospect. He was told by an Icelandic campaigner: “Everyone said, ‘Let’s go back to fishing’”. Another Icelander said: “It (fishing) is a strong part of our identity”. The ideals of the kibbutz and the asceticism of Gandhi also persist as powerful parts of Israeli and Indian identity. This is in spite, or perhaps because, of the pervasive materialism of these societies.

Globalisation is man-made but, as its pace ever quickens and all that is solid melts into the air, it feels beyond human control. This leaves ever more people in circumstances that seem perilous, arbitrary and unfair. This leads them to questions of belonging and identity. I’ve written previously that the rise of the English Defence League is not the only instance of the search for identity turning ugly. In different ways everything from the birther movement to the success of the True Finns and Thilo Sarrazins can be seen through the same prism.

There are two lessons for the left.

First, without retreating to an unhelpful protectionism, actions need to be taken that re-claim globalisation for what it is: less arbitrary and more man-made. Globalisation isn’t some indestructible genie unleashed from the bottle, leaving us only with its wreckage. If we don’t like this globalisation – tax havens for the few; squeeze for the many – we can have another, so long as we have the political will and imagination.

Second, while talk of another globalisation isn’t fanciful, it is technocratic. Tumultuous times demand more visceral consolations. This can produce the ugly fear of the other, as in the birther movement, True Finns and Thilo Sarrazins, or it can celebrate the past glories of the kibbutz, Gandhi and fishing villages. The left can be more comfortable with the latter than the former, but shouldn’t be uncritically so. Eagerness to return to the Icelandic fishing villages of yore is leading to misguided reform to the Icelandic fishing quota system, while the authoritarianism of Hazare is troubling.

The point remains that people now require reassurances in ways that were denied them by New Labour’s narrow and shrill emphasis on the chill winds of global change. If romanticising aspects of national folk stories provides this, then we should be romantics. At the community level, romance means preserving the things that people want to see preserved, while fighting for change where it’s needed. The romance of preserving that with collective meaning should be as much of Labour’s lexicon as the hard-headed rationalism of confronting change.

While his views on immigration are as batty as the Icelandic fishing quota reforms, Maurice Glasman is quite the romantic. Globalisation can be re-made by human agency, but humans must be at ease and up-lifted in their hearts if their heads are to achieve all that they can. Let us be romantic, so that we may be rational.

“It should be. Ted Heath was a relentlessly pragmatic Tory leader who had poor relations with his party in Parliament and in the country. He began in government seemingly fixed on a clear course of reform and modernisation. But then he hit stormy waters and, lacking an ideological compass that might have helped guide him through, was blown over. Having failed to build good relations with his colleagues, he had no reservoir of loyalty on which to draw. When Margaret Thatcher emerged he was sunk.”

Heath, though, did have an objective for his government. He wanted to pacify the trade unions and draw them into a corporatist national project that would make us less like the US and more like France, not simply through being part of the common market, but also in terms of industrial policy and organisation. While one might have misgivings about this, it seems a more substantial project than whatever the defining purpose of Cameron’s government is.

A crisis reveals. The financial meltdown of 2008 revealed Gordon Brown to be a leader of global standing. (Have we seen much of this lately)? The crisis on our streets last week revealed the big society to be something that people just do. As the dust settled the little platoons came out with their brushes.

Something that people already do, seems an odd kind of project for a government. The argument might be made that the government’s point is to nurture and grow such behaviour. But the £2.8 billion of government spending that the voluntary and community sector will lose over the current spending review period is inconsistent with this goal.

While Cameron has even less of an ideological compass than Heath, in many other respects he seems remarkably like the prime minister described by Martin. Cameron, like Heath, has been too aloof to bother working on relations with backbench colleagues. This is most likely to catch up with a prime minister in difficult times. At the height of hackgate James Forsyth reported that a minister had told him that “Number 10 was having trouble getting people to go on TV to bat for the PM”.

Cameron has fair weather friends on the backbenches and growing tension at the top. Internal opponents have recently been briefing against Steve Hilton and leaking his zanier ideas. It is not clear who exactly these opponents are and what they seek to achieve. But this targeting of Hilton, synonymous with the big society, indicates a lack of confidence in high places in Cameron’s big idea and its guru. If Heath was blown over for lack of an ideological compass, Cameron must be at least as vulnerable to such a fate.

His operation has seemed less steady in the absence of Andy Coulson. But Coulson’s past means Cameron must now regret not following through with his initial plan to appoint Guto Harri. Rebekah Brooks intervened and insisted that the then opposition leader go with Coulson. So when aspiring to run the country Cameron considered his judgment subordinate to News International.

His relations with News International are one sense in which the question that came to define Heath hangs over Cameron: who runs the country?

The country has recently insisted that News International do not. Cameron’s deference to Brooks suggests he thought otherwise.

Max Weber defined a state in terms of a monopoly upon violence. So what was the UK when Cameron was sunning himself in Tuscany?

Ministers and police could then not agree on which of them prised the looters monopolisation from them. Now they can’t agree on the utility of the US policing advisor drafted in by Cameron.

The prime minister has also failed to come to an effective agreement with the bankers on their lending. They continue to enjoy backing from the taxpayer but won’t bend to the will of the government.

The extent to which the looters, the police and the bankers run the country isn’t clear. But it’s less obvious than it should be that the prime minister is in charge. Heath got his answer at the ballot box, “not you, mate”. If Cameron were mad enough to now trigger a general election on the same terms, his only saving grace may be the strength of his narrative on the deficit.

This story is of Labour recklessness and Cameron riding to the rescue with tough medicine. The robust return to economic health that we were told this medicine would deliver seems as distant as ever. But Cameron has succeeded in embedding a perception that Labour will tax punitively to spend wastefully.

If Labour can defeat this perception, what is keeping a second rate Ted Heath in Downing Street beyond the next election?

The world has looked perplexed upon the UK this week. Not standing up for justice, but reduced to”violent consumerism“. Clapham Junction isn’t Tahrir Square. We don’t need the international media to tell us something is profoundly wrong after such a debilitating implosion.

We did it to ourselves and that’s what really hurts. Whatever we call this – a Jacquerie (Gabriel Milland), an intifada of the underclass (Andrew Neil/Danny Kruger) – it’s a self-inflicted wound that must rank as one of our country’s darkest episodes in my 31 years. We don’t need to weigh the grief against the miners’ strike (a civil war in which both sides, at least as far as they were represented by Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher, were wrong), Hillsborough (a football match where 96 people died) and 7/7 (mass murder of Britons by Britons) to know this is a bleak and pitiful watershed.

Over a longer horizon than my lifetime, however, the past week might seem less exceptional. Many times in the past, such as in 1780, 1816 and 1936, London saw riots arguably more violent and sometimes just as ostensibly inexplicable as now. The persistence and power of our capacity to descend to disorder and glory in anarchy should be taken as a lesson from this week.

This sits ill, though, with the vaguely whiggish sense of history defaulted to by much of the left. We like to think we’ve progressed since 1780. And, of course, in lots of ways we have. Many people have blackberries now, for one thing. 1780 was no less bloody for want of blackberries. The importance of the state’s capacity to uphold law and order is as fundamental now as in 1780 or in 1651 when Thomas Hobbes wrote the Leviathan.

 But to imagine that the Leviathan of the state can be brought low simply by social media is as much of a misreading as to contend that someone loots a plasma TV because they lost their EMA. To respond to a national calamity with such pure category errors is hardly what the occasion demands. Nor are we meeting these demands by rushing to explanations heavily infused by pre-held ideologies.

For the right, this means a lack of authority in general and from fathers in particular and the destructive impacts of welfare dependency. For the left, resentments fostered by inequalities, a pervasive culture that not only tolerates but actively encourages, at many levels and countless ways, the doctrine that greed is good and that responsibilities to others are simply hindrances to be got around, not the very stuff of humanity.

Neither right or left is wholly wrong in these claims; but can we really only look deep enough into our hearts as to bleat about the same old hobby horses?

The perversity and inadequacy of this is underlined by the failure of anyone to argue in these terms beforehand. No one on the right, to the best of my knowledge, warned that absent fathers risk riots. No one on the left seriously thought the shoplifters of the world would actually unite and try to take over (although, Morrissey took that song title from a Marxist magazine, as I recall).

The plain fact is that, at least for the vast majority of us, events have blindsided us. Out of nowhere we have been exposed to primal urges and a cultural underbelly that are at once both completely alien and utterly human and of our society. The kids in Lord of the Flies were all too human and so are our looters. The difference, of course, is that those that have behaved so irresponsibly this week are, sadly, not fictional. They are our fellow citizens.

Legally and morally they must face the full consequences of their rejection of even the most basic responsibilities. It is as crass to suggest otherwise as to attempt to make cheap political hay out of events. This goes well beyond party politics. It’s about what we are as a country, as a people, as human beings. And it is an immense failure in all of these respects to have amongst us so many so detached from even the most fundamental responsibilities. We should recognise our collective failure and be open to any means, from right or left, which will best correct it.

Picasso said that destruction is the first act of creation. We’ve had the destruction. If we all now really look into our consciences, and draw the right lessons, the creation can yet follow. If we recognise the immense dignity of Tariq Jahan, and have any pride in our country and its people, we would do nothing less.

It is acknowledged that people do not join the Labour party simply to deliver leaflets or attend uninspiring meetings. This tends to go along with support for giving members more say on policy. But parties are vehicles of change, not forums for mass therapy. Party debate is a means to the end of building the world that Labour exists to create.

As our policy review continues, it’s worth reflecting on the “built to last” exercise undertaken by David Cameron after becoming the Tory leader. His government’s programme now appears anything but. His health policy is fudged, his police promises are broken, his public service reforms are rehashed and events have rapidly exposed his defence policy.

The biggest global economic crisis since the 1930s has left almost four in ten voters able to say: “I can’t imagine I’ll ever have the money I want to meet my needs.” Notwithstanding the conflation of wants and needs in this statement, this indicts Cameron’s ability to generate any feel good factor.

Running through many of the government’s failings is a refusal or inability to acknowledge the reality of Britain’s place in the world. They will not place the economic crisis of recent years in its proper global context for fear of distorting their framing of these events as entirely Labour’s fault (and the enduring strength of this frame is one of the government’s trump cards). They will not adapt their defence review to events that the foreign secretary has compared with the fall of the Berlin wall. They will not engage in a meaningful debate about the future of our continent because they are bored by Brussels, contemptuous of Athens and scared of Bill Cash. They will not concede that the UK’s position within global labour markets makes nonsense of their commitment to reduce annual immigration to the UK from “hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands”. This will, as all realities do, catch up with them.

Their immigration policy is just one instance of their being economical with the actualité. Their welfare policy is meant to be about getting people into work. Try telling that to women and council tenants who face perverse work incentives because of policy on tax credits and council housing. And, of course, we were promised “no more top down reform of the NHS” and we were given Andrew Lansley’s earthquake. Michael Gove’s schools reform has proceeded more smoothly than Lansley’s revolution. Could Gove’s relative success be because, as David Aaronovitch recently asked, “he has done pretty much what he told people before the election he would do?”

The implosion of his policy programme matters less to Cameron than it would do to Ed Miliband as prime minister. Cameron believes in nothing, but it is his nothing. It is his occupancy of number 10. It’s not about any bigger purpose. Ironically, gutting himself of principle makes his wholly pragmatic goal of remaining prime minister harder to secure. It makes his government more vulnerable to events. Pragmatism without principle isn’t pragmatic. It’s a ship without a compass. Margaret Thatcher u-turned as prime minister but by never lacking for direction these u-turns didn’t bring into question her fundamental purpose.

Miliband’s purpose is quite different, obviously. He should, nonetheless, ask: What lessons for our policy review can be learnt from the period between “built to last” and now?

The policy review should arrive at a programme that we’d be prepared to defend during the election and be capable of implementing in government. We would be reaping a whirlwind to indulge in any Lansley-like sleights of hand or to promise more than is deliverable, as the government has done on immigration.

Lansley’s reforms have jarred with Cameron’s personal identification with the NHS, which was central to his attempted Tory detoxification. Cameron was right to address negative perceptions attaching to his party, but health policy in government shows that this attempt lacked ballast. This cannot be absent as we tackle the negativity that attaches to us in various policy areas: welfare, immigration, the economy, taxation and “big government” in all its forms.

Not only do we need to show that we get it, but that we require genuinely effective and workable answers. We need also to decisively move beyond the little Englanderism of Cameron – explaining how we will prosper in the post crisis global economy, what kind of Europe should emerge post Eurozone calamity and what our role in the world ought to be post Arab spring.

Yes, robust, inclusive party debate is vital, but so much more so is having this process conclude with a programme that could meet these complex challenges and is genuinely built to last.

Tony Blair, according to his economics advisor as prime minister, isn’t much of an economist. In contrast – the only leader to take Labour to three general election victories – Blair is a politician par excellence. While others are better on economics, what Blair says and doesn’t say on the economy is politically insightful.

Let’s take four points made in his speech and the Q&A at a recent Progress event.

First, Labour should focus more on microeconomic debates and less on the macro-economy.

This seems an oddly technocratic point but reminds me of the view of Douglas Alexander and Jim Murphy that “Labour needs a draw on the deficit and a win on growth”. I suspect I took Alexander by surprise when I asked how we achieve this at a CLP dinner earlier this year.

I also suspect that Blair is giving his answer. We get a draw on the deficit by maintaining a strong line that closes it on the trajectory first specified by Alistair Darling. We get a win on growth not by making arguments about the economy as a whole but by crafting a series of bespoke policy offers sector by sector.

The combined impact of these offers would enable a win on growth and creates a series of talking points with business, which, as Blair stressed, matters because we won’t have this win until we have a phalanx of leading business people prepared to back us.

Second, these are distinct questions:

-          How do we make sure the crisis never happens again?

-          How do we get the economy moving again?

Separating these questions misses the golden thread of confidence. The economy won’t be moving again until we have confidence in a brighter future. We won’t have this until steps are seen to have been taken to mitigate the risk of the crisis of recent years repeating. Rock bottom public confidence attests that this isn’t coming from government.

There is opportunity in this for Labour. But we would create problems for ourselves if in reaching for this we undermine our deficit closure strategy or underplay the emphasis placed upon the tailored microeconomic offers suggested above. The priority should be these offers, rather than grasping for an elusive confidence bullet. As we roll out these offers, though, we should be thinking hard about what mix of financial, trade and fiscal policy that bullet might be composed of. We would be better placed to argue that our bullet is real on the back of some winning microeconomic arguments.

Third, the UK should join the euro when the economic conditions are right.

He’s been saying this for years. Yet the euro, at least as currently constituted, seems in contradiction with reality. As Italy looks ever more like a larger Greece, it threatens to make Lehman Brothers look like a tea party.

Blair, nonetheless, maintains that the geo-political clout of the UK would be maximised by euro membership. While this may or may not be true, euro membership now seems so far from the UK’s economic interest as to beg the question: What steps, if any, can a UK that remains outside the euro for at least the foreseeable future take to maximise our geo-political influence?

Targeting euro membership seems as 1990s as Britpop. Redolent of a time when BRICs were things you built housing bubbles with. Labour should, of course, continue to play a constructive role in the EU. However, we should also more strongly stress our support for updating the institutions of the global economy (e.g. the World Bank and IMF, including the global reserve currency advocated by Roger Bootle). Such reform would contribute towards minimising the chances of the crisis of recent years repeating. Labour advocacy would have us be the internationalist, far-sighted party that we should be.

Fourth, he rightly trumpeted his many achievements as prime minister.

While his government was characterised by much needed increases in public spending, unsustainably high tax revenues from the city afforded a large chunk of this. This un-sustainability goes a long way to explaining the deficit. These tax revenues were recycled through tax credits and similar but the distribution before this secondary redistribution was so skewed that many could only have the lives they wanted through accessing easy credit. This built up a stock of private debt that households are now struggling to pay down.

If a more equal distribution of income and wealth could be achieved without resort to secondary redistributions, these problems would be more containable. And Labour would have achieved its historic purpose. To serve this end, though, we need to return to government.

If done properly, thinking through and taking forward the ideas suggested by the economics of Blair can both make ourselves more electable and better able to realise our historic purpose in government.

I had this on Labour Uncut a few weeks ago:

“We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”.

Denis MacShane sought to console speaker Martin by writing to him with the words of Thomas Babington Macaulay at the height of the expenses scandal. But was this quotation really appropriate?

Weren’t the British people right to be aggrieved by elected representatives defrauding them? Aren’t they also legitimately angry with, as Ed Miliband put it, “bankers who caused the global financial crisis” and “those on benefits who were abusing the system because they could work – but didn’t”? And can there be any doubt that the revulsion of the public against the News of the World is justified?

The spikes in outrage against fiddling politicians and phone-hacking journalists, as well as the slower burning resentment at welfare cheats and fat cat financiers, makes a nonsense of Macaulay. The people he mocks instinctively know right from wrong. And in this intuitive grasp we see ourselves for what we are: communitarians.

The philosopher Julian Baggini foreswore ivory towers and spent six months with the people of Rotherham before concluding that this is the philosophy of the English. It was, incidentally, in the same town that Gerry Robinson tried to “fix the NHS” and Jamie Oliver “taught the poor to cook”. This is a worldview that stresses the responsibilities of the individual to the community. Membership of the community entitles rights and privileges but responsibility demands that these be reciprocated.

We are a nation that wants to see itself made up of; hard working families who play by the rules. We want those who play by the rules to be supported and to get on. We want those who don’t to be punished. The ascendency of Thatcherism, with its win-at-whatever-cost individualism, has obscured the extent to which we see ourselves as members of social groups to which we owe allegiance and the execution of responsibility.

Those who can work have a responsibility to do so. Those who can work but don’t should be penalised. Law makers have a responsibility not to be law breakers. Just like everyone else, including journalists and bankers. And they should feel the full force of the law when in breach of it. These professions are, however, held to more exacting standards of responsibility than legal compliance alone. Their integrity demands more than this. The irresponsibility of hacking the phones of grieving families is about much more than breaking the law.

As Ed Miliband’s advisor Greg Beales tweeted last Wednesday: “Today Ed Miliband spoke for the country because David Cameron can’t. Very important moment”. Tony Blair drew applause from a Progress audience last Friday by saying: “Ed Miliband has shown real leadership this week”.

Cameron’s “catastrophic error of judgement in hiring Andy Coulson” ties him to the violators of the communitarian rulebook. Miliband, in contrast, has made himself a tributary for these rules. And followed this through to demands for the requisite punishments: the resignation of Rebekah Brooks, the referral of News International’s takeover of BSkyB to the competition commission. In doing so, he gave his leadership its biggest turbo-charge to date.

He had previously enjoyed one of his best days with a speech on responsibility that placed him on the right side of the rulebook on welfare and bankers. By throwing everything he could at News International Miliband generated a much bigger impact than that speech had. But he also took a bigger risk.

Because, beyond the fierce urgency of now, a risk is what being sanguine about schmoozing Murdoch – who will more than likely still be a major media player at the next election – amounts to. But smart politics is about calculated risk-taking – and, in a country of communitarians, respecting the rulebook. If the power of newspapers is as diminished as we are sometimes told and if the public standing of News International continues to decline, Murdoch’s bite shouldn’t be as feared as it has been. If Cameron keeps being on the wrong side of the rulebook, he won’t be the winner that Murdoch always looks to back.

The possibility, although still slim, that Murdoch is a busted flush and Cameron a loser suddenly appears real. If Miliband can maintain his forceful leadership on the issue, capturing the public mood then this will increase. It will require much more than a win in today’s Commons vote called by Labour or in the wider debate opened up by the News International revelations.

This debate threatens a rupture between Cameron and the people – and demonstrates that when Ed connects with popular instincts for right and wrong he can lead.