The current malaise in the body politic requires a major rethinking by political parties that have witnessed plummeting memberships and disengagement, especially by younger people.

Our mainstream parties were shaped by distinctive forces in a very different era. In Europe it was the era of the nation state. Manufacturing industry dominated and industrial relationships defined party politics. The Labour party, with its explicit organisational links with trade unions, and the Conservatives, with their equally strong but less transparent links with employers, set workplace relations into political concrete.

Social structures were hierarchical, patriarchal and class-based. People related to town, neighbourhood, community, and communications through social networks that could tap into ties of kinship.

By the end of the 20th century virtually all of these conditions had changed.

Labour’s totemic jettisoning of Clause IV was a symbol of the declining relevance of industrial relationships to the political system. Although the broad political divides remained, the grounding of these in traditional class-consciousness were based on ageing personal loyalties and experiences.

Economic structures had changed beyond recognition. In the UK we saw the rise of a white collar workforce working flexible hours in the service sector. Women’s employment came out of the shadows. This was the age of mobility of capital and the flight of manufacturing industry from the UK to low wage countries.

It was the era of globalisation as a political as well as an economic force. Hierarchical social structures were replaced by a flat, one-dimensional society. Although disparities in wealth remained, class identities were blurred and deference ended.

In all of this change, political structures endured remarkably unchanged. New Labour recognised the scale of the transformation in women’s status, and dramatically increased the number of its women MPs. New Labour also recognised the need to abandon its traditional position on one side of the old class divide and stake out the centre ground.

There was some tinkering by all parties with their methods of working, experiments with electronic instead of printed communications, and a realisation that people wanted a consultative rather than didactic style of politics.

However, for the most part, there was a lack of change in what politicians thought they were doing. Our understanding of the relationship between the public and the state, and the role of elected representative as speaking or voting for constituents remained firmly bedded in the past.

So now society is moving on again. In place of a post-industrial society, new technologies are moving us into the age of the virtual state. In the economy, we are moving on to more personalised production. Young people no longer have to listen to someone else’s idea of a good collection of songs on a vinyl disc – they can download their own choice of music from the internet. In the current debate on the future of energy supply some of the most creative voices are speaking up for micro-generation. The market place has shifted on from the village shop, to the supermarket, to the internet.

Personal relationships and identities have become more fluid, based not on class but on personal choice and life-style self image. Our community can be our street, our special interest group or our chatroom. The new technologies have provided the ability to mix and match, to personalise, to by-pass national and international state conventions. Globalised communications can challenge the power of political parties, but also hold out the potential for new forms of political dialogue and organisation.

Interactive media make it possible for people to put their views instantaneously into the public arena and canvas support from around the world, while in parliament MPs might still be bobbing up and down trying to catch the Speakers eye. Political parties have maintained a high level of privacy about decision-making. This is not a simple matter of the whipping system; it is a political culture that sees deliberative, public decision-making as a weakness.

In a highly mobile age, political parties still operate on small scale geographic boundaries, fixed in time and space by the prosaic reality of the electoral register.

The combination of access, mobility and affluence changes the relationship between citizen and state, and therefore also of the role of elected politicians.

Recently, Labour’s ‘Let’s Talk’ campaign was described thus: ‘We’ll go out and consult people up and down the country, and really listen to them, and take all their views, and we’ll put them through the party’s policy process and we’ll decide what to do.’

Which means forcing the free-thinking of our 21st century constituents into the straitjacket of our 20st century political structures.

If political parties are to regain credibility with the public, we need to align our structures with the more flexible realities shaping their lives and their greater scrutiny of our affairs. For people who can buy healthcare, groceries and music from anywhere in the world, anytime of the day or night across the internet, choice is not even an issue.

It is equally unrealistic to tell people who can make and remake personalised packages of goods and services at will, that they have to accept a fixed five year political prescription.

A virtual state requires us to recast our political styles and structures. In place of centralised decision-taking, the potential is for a more participative, reflexive democracy that engages the electorate in the process of service design and delivery.

Some of David Cameron’s pronouncements touch on this, which is why, misguided as his policy conclusions are, the process by which he reaches them is important.

For us in the Labour party it means we need to restate our collectivist values in a more personalised age. For good or ill, the information revolution has eroded the social ties. We need to find new ways to build social cohesion locally and globally to reconnect with a very new electorate.