This article first appeared in Comment is Free here on 22/9/14

People are hungry for change. Ed Miliband needs to show he is no imperial overlord and empower citizens to bring it about

As the Labour tribe meets in Manchester for its final conference before next year’s election, there’s one conundrum that needs urgently unpicking: the party could be in office by May next year, but never further from power.

Labour’s plight was captured in Glasgow last week as about 60 Labour MPs were sent to make a final push for the no campaign. There to meet them was one man on a rickshaw, armed with nothing more than a boogie box, a loudhailer, a smartphone and a YouTube account. He followed the hapless MPs around, blasting out the theme from Star Wars, while shouting that Scotland’s “imperial masters” had arrived. The stunt was an allegory for our times.

Labour is no evil empire – its people have good hearts – but the way they want to “do good” has too many echoes of a Death Star. They see politics as top-down command and control; Labour doing good things for people, who express their gratitude through the ballot box. It’s all about them, in a world that’s increasingly all about us. Citizens’ alliances and flat networks are taking the place of organised labour and political hierarchies. The shift is creating an existential crisis for Labour. The rebel alliance includes all those who know that pulling the levers of the central state no longer works.

Ed Miliband, in tough circumstances, is struggling to kickstart the struggling party. But despite some brave steps, people know that what Labour proposes will not end austerity, prevent another financial crash, face up to the catastrophic impacts of climate change or reduce the shameful, widening gap between rich and poor. If the Tories continue to fail, and in the absence of anything better, Labour could regain office but the voters’ hearts will be heavy and the crosses on their ballot papers light. Next May Labour could find itself in office but out of power.

This is not just Labour’s problem. No party of labour in the world is on the front foot. It’s an existential crisis of social democracy; the crisis of a 20th-century creed in a 21st-century world. So, what is to be done?

First, we need realism. Labour can’t just wish change out of thin air by being more resolute. Meaningful and sustainable change isn’t fast and furious but deep and resilient. What we need is the gradual building of ideas, organisation and alliances to make future reform more likely. Today, in its bid to fall over the electoral line first, Labour builds a cage for its own victory.

Second, it should embrace Jon Cruddas’s agenda of radical devolution and push power and resources down to people at local and regional level, ensuring it is passed to those who are currently the least powerful. This means involving people in the way this happens, not transferring a centralised bureaucracy to a localised one.

Third, Labour must explode its own myth. Since 1945 it has endlessly tried to repeat the trick of securing the right leader and a parliamentary majority to restart the forward march.

But this misreads history. It was the conditions of 1945 that made the reforms almost inevitable, not just a few party leaders. David Marquand talks about the century-long conversation that took place before a vote was cast, and in Paul Addison’s magisterial The Road to 1945, you feel the force not just of a party and a trade union movement but a cultural, intellectual and civic alliance of leftwing books clubs, radical liberals, Methodists, Clarion cycle clubs and the rest. Yes, it needed a party to galvanise it – but it was the wave that mattered, not the surfers.

Finally, Labour should realise the radical potential of the moment, so evidently on display in Scotland but bubbling up everywhere. Driven, but not determined, by new technology, the world is shifting from vertical hierarchies to horizontal networks. Yes, technology can isolate us. But today most of us can know anything and connect with anyone. Deference has gone and with it old elites and authorities. And on these flatter planes of peer-to-peer networks we are encouraged to behave in more egalitarian and democratic ways. The 1945 settlement became an elitist top-down project. It meant well, but it was never participatory or democratic. Here is a chance, if we get the politics right, to bend modernity to our values and align means with ends.

Can Labour change? It won’t be easy because it’s about the party’s culture. Labour must learn to provide the kind of leadership that enables collective action so that we all lead on the changes needed. In a negative way the Tories show us what’s possible. They were once a patrician, one-nation and compassionate lot, but transformed themselves into a nasty neoliberal vanguard. So big change is possible. In electoral victory or defeat Labour must reinvent itself or it will die. The old emperors have no clothes. The signs are everywhere.