DEMOS

That left Jackie Ashley chairing a panel of Sunder, former LSE Director Tony Giddens and Young Foundation Director (and Demos founder) Geoff Mulgan. It turned out to be a really interesting and constructive conversation.

Tony Giddens started by saying that he thought Labour would stick to the two big ideas that had made it successful in elections so far: First, the primacy of economic policy over social policy and second, not leaving any issues open to the right such as crime or immigration.

He then said what he thought should be the priorities for a third term

* Holding and winning a referendum on the EU constitution
* Embedding public service reform
* Completing constitutional reform such as in the House of Lords and devolution
* And have a greater commitment to egalitarianism.

Sunder Katwala said that it would be about embedding change that has already begun saying that the key test of what a government achieves is whether those things last when they leave office. He thought that much of the legacy of the new Labour government would be in the long term goals it has set or signed up to: halving child poverty, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, improving aid contributions to developing countries.

Geoff Mulgan said that, depending on the result of the election, he thought Labour could deepen, reverse or stagnate in six key areas:

* Public service reform
* Tackling poverty
* Childcare provision
* Constitutional reform
* Climate change
* Internationalism

In its method he thought Labour needed to disassociate itself from top-down centralism.

So perhaps predictably, nobody was predicting a big shift at all. In policy terms it�s all about embedding change.

One thing they did seem to differ on was their confidence about Labour winning the election at all.

Tony Giddens seemed very confident (his answer to the Conservative question �are you thinking what we�re thinking?� was �yes, you�re going to lose�), although he did cite James Suroweicki�s Wisdom of Crowds with the possible scenario that people want to give Blair a bloody nose but stay in Government and that they might overshoot because they can�t guess how other people will vote.

Sunder too seemed confident of a Labour win saying that the Conservatives were weak because they haven�t had the inquest into their electoral failures that they need to. They still think of themselves as the natural party of government, but they�re not. Britain has changed and is a very different place to their heyday in the last century.

But Geoff was much more cautious. He talked about how he remembers canvassing the streets of London in the 1980s when he sometimes felt about as welcome as a Jehovah�s Witness. In fact, since the 1980s Labour has never been confident of winning elections. Even in 1997 when we can all look back and say the result was obvious, the scale of the victory was a genuine shock to a lot of people in the Labour election team. He also mentioned the Queensland scenario where a Labour government was popular and seen to be good on most counts but a conservative opposition suggested that the electorate should bring them down a notch or two. The notch or two however ended up defeating them and the conservatives took power.

I asked a question about the future of the Labour party as an institution. I�m interested because I�m writing a follow-up piece to the one Tom and I wrote for the FT Magazine last year. Tony Giddens seemed to suggest that we don�t really live in a party democracy anyway and that we should think more about the relationship between the media and politics. Sunder made a strong defence of political parties although he did admit that the zeitgeist was that they were in terminal decline. Geoff�s answer was that yes they were in decline and had effectively become national marketing organisations following the Saatchi years in Mrs Thatcher�s government. He advocated greater devolution and reinvigoration of local government, including encouraging young political hopefuls to spend their political apprenticeship in local government rather than in Westminster. That, he thought, would make parties relevant again.