The argument is quite simple and is summed up by the first line. “There is nothing right wing about fiscal conservatism”.

It makes the sensible (and I believe correct) argument that the only way to ensure that we poverty and ensure social justice is if the public books are balanced and that any funding isn’t just here today, gone tomorrow. It needs a sustainable and targeted investment over the long term, not just a few years of boom followed by a ten-year fiscal headache.

The paper highlights that Labour could produce concrete plans for the lifetime of a single Parliament, and potentially set firms goals on levels of tax, spending and borrowing over these cycles – this would be bold and brave and would certainly give an air of economic credibility that Labour presently lacks.

However this is paper also highlights the danger for the Conservative Party and the “conservative” (that is to say, cautious) caucus within the top levels of the leadership. Many of them think that providing we get through the present economic situation and that there are jobs and growth in 2015, we will get re-elected either with a Tory majority or a new five year Con-Lib Dem Coalition. Focus on the bread and butter, drop the Big Society and all that time consuming reform and we’ll win. It’s the economy, stupid.

It all very much smacks of that tried and tested (and failed) tactic of 1997 which is “ok, you might not trust us on public services, welfare reform, education or much else, but do you trust Labour with the economy?”

They expect the answer to be “No”, particularly given the way that the two Eds have participated in the economic debate so far. But Labour has another tactic which it can pull from 1997 – when they countered the Tory “economic competency” card.

All it would take for Labour to do, in the run up to the General Election 2015, is to promise to follow the Coalition’s spending plans till 2016-17 when they plan to eliminate the structural deficit and balance the books. Just like when in 1997, when Gordon Brown and Ed Balls promised to follow the Conservative’s spending plans up to 1999 to take away the idea that Labour was going to trash the public finances on taking office. Remember good old prudence?

At a stroke, Ed Balls can claim economic competency (after all, the Government’s attacks would be hollow if Labour merely promised to do the same thing) and move the debate to public services, welfare, education etc. where they are on much stronger ground and where the Government is presently incredibly weak.

Of course there are risks for Labour – will people believe them given their record over the past thirteen years? However it would certainly be music to the ears of many voters who don’t trust Labour on the economy, but would prefer the rest of their package to what the Conservatives are offering and might give them the chance to make a credible case for Government – something which they have not yet been able to do.

The only way for the Coalition and particularly the Conservative Party to prevent this is not to slow down on public service reform but to speed it up. Only successful reform of our public services with better schools and hospitals, less welfare dependency and more engaged communities will provide the ammunition to defeat Labour in 2015.

Moreover what if the economy goes wrong? The Government will need to have something else to defend itself with.

And time is running out; any changes that are not enacted in the next 12 to 18 months will probably not take effect by 2015 and leave the Government doing all the hard work with none of the credit for the results.

Worryingly, a usually reliable source, has posted that we are effectively back to square one.

This isn’t a terribly bad thing, if it means that we end up with more radical and transformative proposals but it does mean that the Government will need to seriously ramp up the timescales if they are to be electorally significant.

This isn’t a very popular message with a Government still smarting from the scars of trying to reform the NHS, but the truth hurts.

A seminal moment in the Labour Party’s relationship with business happened when 50 business leaders at the last election signed a letter backing the Conservatives. Due to the lack of good will amongst businesses Labour could not muster a response. Today nothing has changed. Labour have only just (prompted by the pamphlet?) re-opened their business relations unit. Bozier and Smith hope that ‘Labour’s business’ will evolve into a ‘Labour and Business Friendly Network’ where ideas can be exchanged. Rather than being an exclusive club the network would be open to any Labour sympathisers who are involved with running an enterprise. As well as being a voice in the shaping of Labour policy the network can help the Party to quickly respond to any future letters.

It’s always good to talk. Kitty Ussher stated that it was a necessity for Labour to have a discussion about business and the economy. It doesn’t matter if things are said that may offend others, Labour need to look at all options, all opinions. Ms Ussher described capitalism as being a very powerful force, while the job of progressive politicians was to shape capitalism so it can be used for good. This all sounds very wirthy but as the last Labour Government showed getting the balance between freedom and control, small and big, is not easy.

Rowenna Davis made the salient point that if Labour had a better narrative on the private sector then the mainstream would be more willing to listen to their views on public sector. The Labour movement was born during an era of mass production and consequences of the Industrial Revolution. What impressed me about the event was how it looked at what Labour means in the 21^st Century, where entry barriers are lower, access to information easier, and micro-businesses more common. The pamphlet contains many interesting ideas. Some of my favourites are:

• Tax incentives for repeat investments in new start-ups,
• Making small enterprise a viable third option for school leavers through a commitment to a National Young Enterprise programme.
• Supporting SME’s to bid for parts of large government contracts by reducing bureaucracy and vendor “lock in” and making procurement process more transparent.

It was a shame that the change in venue meant that Chuka Umunna, Shadow BIS Secretary, could not attend. It would have been interesting to hear Labour’s thinking on how to make enterprise at the heart ‘the movement’. To be blunt the impression given to an outsider like me is that no business orientated thinking happens in the Party’s hierarchy.  As much as the public intuitively despise ‘bankers’ we know that a healthy business sector would increase our collective wealth. Labour has a problem. At a time when economic matters are everyone’s chief concern only 24% think it would be better for the UK if Ed Balls had delivered the Autumn Statement. To quote John Rentoul

“One of the audience (from Mark Rowney) posed the question most starkly: “Could we imagine the shadow cabinet saying, ‘Profit is good’?”

That is number 740 in my series of Questions to Which the Answer is No, and, until it is answered differently, Labour lacks credibility on the economy.”

From a narrow political perspective I welcome that this event was on Labour’s fringes. From a broader public interest concern it is desirable for there to be a meaningful debate over one of the most important aspects of British society. As a believer in the benefits of competition – and in the knowledge that Cameron & Co perform best under pressure – I genuinely hope that those Labourites who support business are brought in from the cold.

However while playing the insurgent by talking up his tearing up of rule books and banging on about his progressive credentials and the ‘Promise of Britain’ – Mr Miliband here perhaps hit on an essential truth about Britain which some in the Coalition are not prepared to admit and which could win him an election – Britain is essential a conservative (small-c) nation.

Yes, we did have a vibrant multicultural society and yes, we have a more open society than others say in the Middle East – but I do not mean conservative in the sense of tea party movements or religious rights. I mean conservative in the sense of risk.

In his excellent book “Conservatism”, Kieron O’Hara talks about conservatism as a way of “problematizing change” and approaching issues from the point of view of risk management.  Whereas the socialist or the liberal marches forward with their plans safe in the comfort of theory, the conservative pauses to reflect and analyses the evidence for change – accepting or rejecting based on a calculation of risk.

Take a look at the AV Referendum an example of this “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude. Open to the possibility of electoral reform at first, the country was easily persuaded that actually on second thoughts, it was probably not the best idea to start chopping and changing the system.

Mr Miliband may have learnt from this, that the Coalition’s reformist agenda might actually pose a series of traps which he merely has to allow them to walk into and then reap the electoral dividends.

Take the NHS for example. David Cameron worked so hard before the election to win the public’s confidence on this issue, and he almost succeeded. One extremely radical reform package and disastrous PR campaign later and Labour has once again taken an almost unassailable lead on this issue.

The whole problem for the Coalition is the timing of the election.

When Thatcher won in 1979, we’d had the Winter of Discontent. In May 2010 while the storm clouds were brewing over the UK, there was no economic hurricane.

The terrible consequences of Labour’s policies on the deficit never came into being – because the Coalition Government was there to stop them. As such, people’s tolerance to risk and reform is much lower than it would have been than if the election had been say 12 months later, with all the inevitable consequences that Labour’s lack of action on the deficit would have caused.

Again to compare to 1979, there was arguably a greater sense of urgency and concern about the fate of the country. There was a general feeling that we were going downhill and the “sickman of Europe”. Strikes were a visible representation of that problem, an issue which people could see and could comprehend directly.

The deficit by contrast is invisible and difficult to put into the forefront of people’s minds. The effects of not having a credible deficit plan and having circling bond markets and potentially even bailouts, are simply counterfactuals for the British public.

People did not support the NHS reforms because they do not see why it needs to change –  the NHS has been running well and the tolerance to risk is low. Moreover, the Coalition will have a tough job convincing the public that its reforms were necessary because the problems that may have been caused by not reforming may never be felt.

By contrast, reforms to welfare have not met such opposition because people have read for years about the failures of the system and the evidence has been much documented. The tolerance of risk is higher and as a consequence, people are more comfortable about changing the system because they believe that they have little to lose from present arrangements.

Mr Miliband may calculate that as people’s tolerance for risk is low and as the Coalition is forced to reform or reshape services as a consequence of a tighter financial situation, that he can reap the electoral dividend by merely talking up the risks, as Labour successfully did with the NHS, and not commit itself to any particular policies.

This has risks for Mr Miliband of course, but that is for another article.

For the Coalition, the solution is simple. To borrow a phrase from a former Labour Prime Minister they must change the “calculus of risk”.

If the Coalition can convince the public that the situation is more urgent, that the risk of not reforming public services and reshaping government’s role are high, then it will be able to carry the public with it.

Vince Cable perhaps was hitting the right idea when he spoke of this being the “economic equivalent of war”. War creates a sense of urgency, makes people more willing to take risks and to make sacrifices in the hope of benefits to come.

Perhaps the first part of this Coalition can be considered the “phoney war” – in which before the cuts have really started to bite and before the economic situation gets worse, the action the deficit and public sector reform seems almost unnecessary.

But the Coalition had better start making it feel necessary to the public – otherwise, Mr Miliband may merely have to sit back and play on the fears of the public that this Government is risking our economy and public services, for no reason other than ideology.

It has often been an attack on Coalition Ministers that they are taking it too easy  and that needs to change if we are going to win the next election. The Prime Minister should consider more meetings, summits and conferences that with business, union, public service leaders and civil society to get across the urgency and the civil service needs to ratcheted up.

But if the Coalition can create that sense of urgency, then it can force Mr Miliband’s hand and create the political consensus it needs to succeed in its public service reform agenda.

Now feel free for a moment to establish your own narrative about how the culture New Labour years led “inevitably” to the phone-hacking outrages. It’s easy: when the government will do anything for a story are we surprised that the media are any different? When lies, character assassination and the breach of the privacy of, say, David Kelly, flood out ofWhitehallare we surprised when the poison spreads down Fleet Street? Insert your own examples from McBride, Mandelson, Moore and so on.

No, I don’t buy that explanation of the phone-hacking scandal. It’s cheap and self-serving, and people are, at the end of the day, responsible for their own actions. The zeitgeist does not send an instruction booklet.

However, what is astonishing is that the Labour party has any right to be heard whatsoever on the issue of the ethics of news. They presided over ropey ethical standards in government and the split from News International was certainly not their choice. Former Brown acolytes and discredited figures such as Prescott should not be on the rampage on this issue.

We need to wake up and realise that we are not fighting the Labour party of 25 years ago. The modern Labour party means business: when we pull a knife, they pull a gun.

 They have recognised that the phone-hacking story hurts us. This goes way beyond Coulson. The Conservative party de-regulated markets and allowed businesses such as the Murdoch empire to flourish. The moral failures of these businesses therefore reflect on us. This is a weakness in our brand. And Labour’s attack dogs know full well that brand is just posh for prejudice, and they know exactly how to exploit that.

 We need to fight back. The current Labour leadership have climbed on top of a dung-heap of nastiness and incompetence but their sins are already forgotten. This must be reversed or we will be vulnerable to Labour’s moral posturing in crisis after crisis.

First of all we need to address the Labour policy record: we were told last year that there would be a summer of scrutiny. There wasn’t. It is not too late to deliver that scrutiny. As we saw from this week’s announcement about the contract for Thameslink carriages going abroad we are still feeling the effect of Labour’s mistakes.

Then we need to scrutinise the weak points in how the New Labour government operated: the financial extravagance and indulgence, the treatment of staff and the media management culture. We need to use Freedom of Information, Parliamentary Questions, and where possible, the drive for greater government transparency, to leverage out the information about Labour’s own nasty streak.

Separately the right-wing press needs to carry out its own investigations, going over everything from Labour’s policies through it spinning to the professional and recreational habits of Tom Baldwin. This last process has already been started by Lord Ashcroft.  However, unless former Labour apparatchiks are caught red-handed in links to this crisis the most effective attacks will be after this story has died down.

Remember: we haven’t won an election in 20 years, and we won’t until we stop pulling our punches.

Life is of course not as simple as the above. On Tuesday the former Labour Home Secretary, David Blunkett, gave a speech to the right-wing think-tank Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). The CSJ is famous for being the place where Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) gained political gravitas after he had failed to find any status when leader of the Conservative Party. The CSJ is also highly regarded for the research it conducts on the causes of poverty. The title of Blunkett’s speech was: ‘The politics of fear versus the politics of hope in a rapidly changing world.’

According to the former Home Secretary we live in a world that has never had so much rapid change in it as we do now. This leads to greater uncertainty in life. Blunkett acknowledged that the past contained insecurities and uncertainties but the impacts of this were less negative as  people were more likely to live in a stable family and community environment.

Rapid social change means that people find it hard to get to grips with what is happen to their local shops, schools and community environment. People fear change when they don’t understand it. Blunkett admitted that Labour made a mistake when they allowed unlimited immigration from Eastern Europe. The statisticians had only predicted a fraction of the eventual number who would come to Britain.

In David’s experience a lot of people on benefits write themselves off too easily. He wished IDS good luck with his current legislative programme but warned that welfare reform is very difficult. Every step you take will be challenged by those who are directly effected, plus well meaning people who don’t understand the bigger structural issues the country faces.

Blunkett believes that there needs to be a two sided message to welfare. The first is that it is right to help people in need. The second is that the purpose of welfare should be to get people away from being reliant on benefits. In the post-war era welfare provisions were nationalised. This was needed because the country faced huge problems post-World War II.  It was refreshing to hear a Labour politician talk about the downside of this approach. If people don’t feel close to the people they are helping then reciprocity** brakes down.

David Blunkett’s conclusion was that it is now time to decentralise the welfare state. The current model is not relevant to the world we live in. Blunkett would like to see both the Labour and Conservatives, and maybe even the Lib Dems, work together to find the best way to achieve this goal.

I certainly do not agree with everything that David Blunkett believes in but it was good to hear a Labour politician acknowledge that the status quo is unsustainable and offer a decentralising Labour alternative. As Ed Miliband launches Labour’s policy review he would do well to follow Blunkett’s approach of tackling the substance of the problems we face, rather than opportunistic point scoring

*You can’t blame a political partisan for trying…

** Reciprocity: A mutual or cooperative interchange of favours or privileges

I don’t dispute that I am very fortunate in all sorts of ways. Nor do I dispute that people who rely on in-work benefits are having a tough time of it. But what I objected to was his assumption that people in that situation can’t aspire to a better life. And that, I think, is a fundamental difference between Labour and Conservative philosophies.

Taking it back a step – I think it is odd that there isn’t already a cap on the total benefits one household can receive. I think it is pointless that we ask people on very low incomes to pay tax at all (and well done, again, to the Lib Dems for getting the proposal to remove the lowest paid from the tax system into the Coalition agreement – we thought the Tories should have adopted it anyway, and I think we should aspire to go further). I think it is scandalous that we ask people on low incomes to  subsidise people who are better off than them with, for example, child benefit, and housing benefit that gives those who take it better homes than those who subsidise them. I think it’s questionable that we allow – encourage, even – people to stay in council houses at reduced rents even when they earn plenty to allow them to either have their own home or pay a full rent. Of course there needs to be flexibility, and personalisation, and I wouldn’t want any one to be thrown out of their home, but we do have a serious problem of lack of good social housing, and I think we should look at who really needs it.

Setting all of that aside – my underlying assumption is that everyone who can, should work. That everyone who can, should endeavour to make the most of their lives. And that everyone who needs it is entitled to help from the rest of us to live a decent life. But his assumption was that there is no scope and indeed no need for that family relying on tax credits to improve their own situation. Which I think is fundamentally wrong, and is why Labour is perceived to be a party in favour of abandoning people in a dead-end.

If this government is about anything – beyond fixing the dire finances which Labour, as usual, has left us – it is about aspiration. For individuals to improve their own situation, for neighbourhoods to have more control over their own destiny, for communities to come together to achieve what is right for them, and for our society as a whole to grow and improve in a way that we collectively want it to.

Where Ed Miliband was right was when he talked about responsibility. In fact, much of the (not very much) meat of that speech could indeed be a Cameron speech, despite the inconsistencies and the fact that Labour had 13 years to address – or not cause – some of these problems. But given that even Ed Miliband recognised that the Labour party has got itself into a position where it needs to say that it is not the “party of those ripping off our society” (and those are his words, not mine), I’m not holding my breath for Labour to be seen as the party to fix this any time soon. Nor, sadly, for them to walk through the lobbies this week to vote for Iain Duncan Smith’s reforms.

One the great debates amongst political geeks is whether Prime Ministers Question Time actually makes any difference. This week’s evidence suggests that it does. Ed Miliband’s woeful performance, when he had the choice of a high number of subjects that would have embarrassed Cameron, may have been the final nudge that convinced doubters to stop biting their tongues and start anonymously briefing.

As a Conservative I can’t help but have a mischievous feeling of pleasure, watching our opponent’s self-combust. Tim Montgomerie reports that a Cabinet minister cheerfully told him the Coalition just had their best week.

“We’ve dumped two policies that could have caused us enormous problems, he said. We suffered 48 hours of bad publicity but we’re now closer to the public on the NHS and crime. We can now focus on the core tasks of the economy, welfare, schools and immigration. At the same time, he continued, Labour are in meltdown. Labour’s Number 2, Ed Balls has been proven as a liar. It’s now obvious the Shadow Chancellor was plotting against Blair. The people around David Miliband – if not the former Foreign Secretary himself – are becoming more brazen in their attempts to undermine Ed.”

More and more friends are starting to draw parallels between Labour’s current problems and our bleak years in the wilderness. But before we assume that Labour will be out of power for a generation we must remember that there are key important differences:

1)    In 1997 Labour had a majority of over 100 MPs, and many of these had a decent personal majority. The current Conservative party is 19 short of a majority and many of our MPs are within striking distance. On current boundaries Labour only needs a small swing at the next election to become the biggest party in the Commons.

2)    In the decade after 1997 the economy was on the up, pay awards on average increased healthily each year, property value rose and rose, people felt financially secure. These conditions made people less interested in change.

3)    Back then a significant number of people disliked the Conservative party and viewed us as being “nasty”. These people did not want us to succeed. In my opinion Labour is currently viewed with pity but people will be willing to give them the chance to improve.

Let’s not allow the current difficulties of Labour to make us complacent. As David Miliband’s speech shows, they do have the ability to become more centrist. The Conservative Party still needs to work hard and work smart if we are going to have a chance of winning in 2015.

It’s worth considering Hasan’s points in turn:

“On Blair’s watch, Labour lost four million votes between 1997 and 2005. Lest we forget, in the 2005 general election, Blair was re-elected with a vote share of 35 per cent – that’s less than the majority-less Cameron achieved in 2010.”

That’s rather belittling the level of Blair’s electoral achievements.  Hasan forgets that before 1997, Labour hadn’t won an election with a proper working majority for over thirty years (the majority of 3 in 1974 hardly counts).  Only two years before Blair became party leader, Giles Radice published the pamphlet, ‘Southern Discomfort’ – asking whether Labour could ever win an election again.  Blair won with majorities of 179, 167 and 66 – winning in parts of England, particularly in the South where Labour hadn’t won since 1945. He won 50% of the votes of C2s in 1997, compared to Gordon Brown’s 29% in 2010.  Ed Miliband again has Southern Discomfort – he could do with listening to Blair, who managed to win in the South and to massively win over aspirational voters.  Without doing that, Ed Miliband will not be able to win a majority.

“When Blair left office in the summer of 2007, his personal poll ratings were falling – and so too were the Labour Party’s. As the authors of the new book,Explaining Cameron’s Coalition, argue, ‘Blair’s ratings were falling from 1997 and that, even if Labour had not changed leader, it is likely that Blair’s would have been as low as Brown’s were by 2010.’

Such a statement is to engage in wild speculation.  What is clear is that Blair’s electoral record is that he was one of the most remarkably successful campaigners of the modern age, who would probably have blossomed in the TV debate format.  The last YouGov poll before Blair left office had Labour and the Conservatives virtually level pegging.

“Blair invaded Iraq. Regardless of whether you think it was right or wrong to topple Saddam Hussein, politically, the war was a massive misjudgement on Blair’s part.”

This isn’t the place to engage in a discussion about the rights and wrongs of the Iraq War.  But Blair did win an election with a majority of 66 when the controversy over the war was at its peak.  Interestingly, a You Gov poll has showed that the public believe that Blair’s immigration policy was a bigger policy failure than the Iraq war.  The same poll showed that 20% of the public think that Blair was the best Prime Minister since the war and more people think it would be a mistake for Labour to abandon Blair’s legacy than those who think that Labour should turn a new page.

One fact is simple.  Blair was by some distance the most successful political leader in Labour’s history and is the most successful political leader electorally since the war.  He created the template for how a Leader of the Opposition can set the policy agenda and how Labour could appeal to aspirational voters needed to win a majority.  He is the only leader in Labour’s history not to have lost an election.  To ignore his advice looks like extreme folly.

Then yesterday I read an illuminating piece from Dan Hodges in the New Statesman, discussing the Labour Party’s current policy reviews (which, by the way, sound incredibly unfocused and designed to delay having anything to say rather than any serious attempt to identify where Labour went wrong and what they should do to put it right, but that’s for another day).

Some of his criticisms chime with mine. The most important thing when you’re undertaking a policy review is, I think, that you still hold fast to your values and you make sure that you knit your policies around them to suit the times. Certainly that is what the Conservative policy review process did in 2006-8; and usefully as well, the point of them was to actively seek ideas from non-traditional sources.

So to me, it’s completely bizarre that one of the main complaints in the article is that only a small proportion of the responses have come from Labour party members. Now I could understand that if all the non-members send in is criticism of Labour’s record in government (and there’s plenty to criticise) but surely one of the fundamental problems of Labour in government was that they were convinced that they knew best and we knew nothing?

Given that that appears not to have changed, Labour’s policy review doesn’t look terribly likely to succeed…

More broadly though, is my presumption in favour of crowd-sourcing really a good one?

You can read page after page of complaints from people who’ve tried to get involved with, for example, the Budget crowd-sourcing, or with reviews of regulation, or with Big Society projects, or even the Great Repeal bill – and so many of them say that no-one centrally bothered to engage with them, that their ideas were ignored, or – perhaps worst of all – they were told that what they were making suggestions around was not up for discussion.

And then if I talk to some people who are involved in actually inviting opinions and responses, they too have their complaints – it’s always the same (few) people who reply, saying the same thing, with their corporate-speak and their lobbying campaigns; and if someone with a real passion for something but no vested interests does come along, too often they refuse to see that their issue is affected by and has effects on other areas.

So there are problems on both sides with crowd-sourcing. But it can and does work – though, as I argued in my czars piece – the participants on both sides need some ground rules.

I would suggest that both sides need to be clear on what is being asked for – is it blue sky craziness (which, as Tim Harford argues persuasively, sometimes can be what’s needed) or is it good, solid best practice? Is the Party prepared to fundamentally re-examine its policies, or is it just window-dressing? Are the fundamentals right in the first place (for example, when the Conservatives did the policy review, it was after 3 big defeats and a – slow but eventual – realisation that we had to operate in the modern world. I’m not sure Labour has got to the crux of their problem yet).

Perhaps the key to crowd-sourcing though is asking the right people – or at the very least, identifying those people who have something useful to say. How you do that is open to debate, and it very much depends on what you want to know. People who are happy with services generally tend not to say much about them; it’s the unhappy ones who make a lot of noise, which of course is likely to give you an unbalanced view.

Part of how to identify the right people is something that the Big Society is all about – it’s about engaging many many more people in what goes on around them. Crowd-sourcing probably isn’t really a valid mainstream way to address big problems in society as yet. But it could be. Just look at how people ask for recommendations on Twitter, or at some of the examples in this article about specialised problem-solving. And then think about the power of having all the energy, brainpower and experience of a whole load of people brought to bear on the little things that make our lives worthwhile…

This movement is seeking to create a “Purple Book” in an effort to articulate its vision and is part of an attempt to woo back the Liberal Democrats. Sylvester states that “in fact it is possible to see scope for a new Lib-Lab alliance, grown out of the liberal Centre rather than the social democratic left”.

This is a possibility. But I think that the article – and the Westminster village – is ignoring how closely the Purple Book and the ‘Red Tory’ or Centrist Conservatives are starting to align.

The Purple Book will, the article says, focus on some common themes such as the “role of government and decentralisation” – decentralisation, of course, is one of the most radical parts of the Tory modernisers’ project. It will also talk about the “need to move away from reliance on a big State and redistribute power to individuals and communities” – again, that’s sounding familiar…

The truth is that the Blue Labour/Purple Book agenda and the Red Tory/Centrist Conservative agenda are converging very rapidly.

Both move beyond the legacy of Thatcher and the rampant free market fundamentalism/individualism which it represented. Both reject the Fabianism of the Blair years which embraced managerialist government with its targets, centralisation and command/control politics.

Both sides are converging (more so than the Liberal Democrats, who despite last week’s setbacks are wedded far too much to the special interests of local government) on the idea of breaking politics out of the traditional shackles of elections, parties and formal democratic institutions and directly empowering citizens, communities and their chosen organisations – whether they be charities, voluntary groups, social enterprises, co-operatives or unions.

In hushed voices you can sometimes hear modernisers speak of Cameron’s grand project to break the Liberal Democrats in two – bringing the “liberal” Orange Bookers into the fold and leaving the old “Labour-leaning” wing of the Party floating back into irrelevance. This is a bold strategy, but why stop there?

The really grand strategy would be to break the Labour Party in two. Divorce the centrist “Blairite” wing of the party (read – the electorally successful part) from the “Old Labour” wing.

This would give the Modernising Project the broad, centrist base that it has always wanted and needs if it is going to win future elections. Cameron used to call himself the “heir to Blair” and much of his success has been convincing voters who supported Blair to support him instead. So he should be focusing on generating intellectual links with the Purple Bookers in order to make his claim reality.

Sure, there is a great deal of partisanship, decades of prejudice, myth-making and suspicion, and this might take years to achieve – but this would be a true re-alignment of politics.

The Big Society will require decades to fully embed itself and needs years of electoral success – we need the broadest coalition possible. Orange Bookers, Purple Bookers and Centrist Tories – working together. This could be the future of British politics.

Ever since the early 1990s and the victory of Blair, it has been the Conservatives who have been on the intellectual back foot. Finally, Cameron & Co have given the Tories the intellectual advantage. The Labour Party from David Miliband to Jon Cruddas can see that the Big Society is a fantastic opportunity to build a new democracy and a new economy. “Blue Labour”/ Purple Bookers/New Labour – they all want to get in on the act – but fortunately for Conservatives, we currently hold the high ground.

So let’s at least starting trying to co-opt them in the early stages of the project, while Ed Miliband continues to dither.

If successful, it could see a radical centrist Government in power for the long term and give us the chance to build the new kind of Britain that we all want to see.