To be a newspaper columnist looks like a grand thing. It feels like the outmost limit of power without responsibility to be able to ruminate on the rise and fall of the great. Yet, far from taking advantage of their freedom, columnists all seem to move in a herd. Whether left or right, they nibble on the same account of what’s what, who’s up and who’s down. Their distinctiveness is usually in the solutions they offer, rather than in the analysis.

So, if Labour looks to be in trouble, the answer is to move hard to the left, or – of course – hard to the right; to invade Iran, or to withdraw from Iraq. But the basic account is rarely in question, and very often it comes down to personalities and even cod-psychology from the writer. Columnists, by and large, have taken down our political leaders from their pedestals and placed them on the couch instead.

However, there is one exception. While the comfortable herd grazes and lows in the pastures, Steve Richards, is the lonely mountain goat, hopping around the more interesting and less accessible terrain. Take today’s piece. Everyone else seems to be reading the current giddy politics as a new chapter of HE Marshall’s Our Island Story, where for the sake of the kids, history is simplified into personality traits and personal disputes. King Gordon was like this, Prince David did this … But Richards’ piece belongs to a different lineage. It is more like the journalism of Peter Jenkins or Hugo Young, that looks at politics as a place where social change and historical forces tussle, as well as just personalities.

Today’s column raises the wider issue of Labour’s positioning, its long-term policies in relation to the forces now shaping our lives. It is certainly more interesting to read. But it may be actually more challenging for Labour. Right now there is a prevalent and somewhat comfortable fiction in the press that political parties need only to conduct a Myers-Briggs screening test on potential leaders and they’ll be in power for a million years. Political parties, particularly those on the left also have to make a case for their times, not just pick a plausible front-man.

Some of Richards’ suggestions in the final paragraph, the new political urgency of regulating the financial services industry and fighting poverty, point one way forward for Labour. He could have gone even further. The government’s current troubles stem largely from the US and its recent economic decisions. It is the rightwing Republicans’ domestic and economic policies – ironically not their foreign policy – that jeopardise one of the last remaining leftwing governments in Europe. Labour weathered the political cost of Iraq, only now to be imperilled by the voodoo economics of the Bush White House.

But that feels like abstraction to voters. To make it stick the government would have to have the courage to tell the story about how the right in the US has arrogated the proceeds of growth to the richest of the rich, loaded new health and other costs on to static middle-class household incomes, cut taxes with borrowing and deregulated to the point of instability. The prize to be won is linking the right to economic risk. The downside is alienating Rupert Murdoch and Irwin Stelzer (his vicar on earth) among others.

The politics of the last year have struggled to cope with a new immediacy of the link between household costs budgets and the interdependent global economy. Our front doors now open onto the world. Our bills, our jobs, our credit now fluctuate like the stock markets. At the same time growing national wealth doesn’t seem to be creating satisfaction for individuals.

Forgive the anecdote, but watching a reality TV show the other day, I noticed that one of participants was a postman in late middle age, living in a largish semi-detached house. What’s the surprise there? Well, the wage of the postman is in the teens. Who knows all the family circumstances in this case; but then it got me thinking how strange that would look for younger generations. That is simply, the idea that you could do a job, just a job, and live a stable life in a nice big house, with a secure retirement ahead of you. You wouldn’t necessarily rely on parental help for the house and live in fear or redundancy or the stock market wiping out your pension.

Labour is used to policies that remit market failures in employment; Labour is used to filling the gaps the market leaves. But increasingly now, the real challenge looks to be opening up the black box of the market itself and ensuring that hard work gets its fair reward. In any case, the vision of Britain as a kind of economic aircraft carrier off the coast of Europe looks less convincing. What is the economy good for, if it doesn’t reward work with decent prosperity and security?

In any case, Steve Richards is right. The challenge for Labour is to look outside politics and personalities to the bigger forces touching peoples lives. When it can talk to real problems and truly promise something better, then it becomes the change people seek and need.