For pioneers of our movement, like Keir Hardie or George Lansbury, socialism was about the dispersal of power. In RH Tawney’s classic lectures on equality, inequality of means was directly linked to inequality of power. The dispersal of power was thus a prerequisite of a socialist society.

These truths were never more relevant than today, with our democracy visibly in crisis. Our old power mechanisms, the traditional constitution of which Walter Bagehot, AV Dicey and Sir Ivor Jennings wrote, based on parliamentary sovereignty and majoritarian rule, has gone forever. All our textbooks are out of date. Big Ben chimes over the debris. We have a hollowed-out, still undemocratic, system in which parliament is variously curbed by the EU and by devolution, by some judicial review and occasional referendums. There are fundamental laws which parliament effectively cannot repeal, notably on human rights. The cabinet has become virtually a ‘dignified’ part of the constitution. The elected government is being replaced by a stage army of ‘czars’, regulators and managers, which makes a mockery of the familiar question, ‘What is the minister doing about it?’

Last November’s Queen’s speech contained little on these fundamental matters. People behold a confusing system in which the state seems weaker and stronger at the same time, power being both dispersed and concentrated simultaneously. We have both local devolution and central threats to civil liberties. Parliament and parliamentarians, often unfairly, meet with popular contempt. It is a process that goes far beyond the press trivia of duck islands or bath plugs and presents a profound challenge to any future Labour government.

In a paradoxical way, this situation is partly to the government’s credit. It has put through a series of major constitutional reforms since 1997. All of them should be built on and taken much further. House of Lords reform has been in the doldrums since 1999. No socialist can fail to support a democratic house, although it is vital that the electoral system ensures that a reformed house preserves its sense of independence and is in no way a clone of the House of Commons. The Human Rights Act should be defended more robustly by ministers, and the new, visibly separate, supreme court encouraged to develop an independent posture in extending its role.

Asymmetrical devolution in Scotland and Wales should be reformed. The financial arrangements should be overhauled and the time-worn Barnett formula (manifestly unfavourable to Wales) replaced. The Jones-Parry report, proposing a referendum to enable the Welsh assembly to have the law-making powers of the Scottish parliament, should be followed up promptly. The Freedom of Information Act should be stripped of bureaucratic exemptions and freed of ministerial obstruction, notably over the events leading to the invasion of Iraq. But all these were great reforms, all resisted by the Tories who remain almost as suspicious of promoting democracy as they were a century ago. Lord Strathclyde, Tory leader in the unelected house, in proposing the obstruction of government legislation sounded like a throwback to the days of Lloyd George’s budget. A last bark for Mr. Balfour’s poodle.

Other aspects of the current crisis of democracy are less to the government’s credit. Gordon Brown began as premier with an inspirational statement on the primacy of constitutional reform with citizenship as a key to national renewal. There was much reference to Tom Paine and John Stuart Mill. This was, sadly, not followed up. The 2008 constitutional renewal bill was distinctly miscellaneous, ranging in its themes from demos in Parliament Square to the right to go to war. Lord Falconer, unfairly I think, called it ‘a constitutional retreat’. The present bill going through parliament retains some excellent bits, notably on civil service independence and parliamentary approval of treaties, but statutory war-making powers and restricting the role of the attorney general have been dropped. It covers some fringe aspects of Lords reform but does not get to grips with the main issues.

To quote Churchill, this pudding has no theme. So, as Matthew Flinders wrote last October in Parliamentary Affairs, we drift in a state of ‘constitutional anomie’. A government which rightly prides itself on the dispersal of power also ratchets up powers of control and surveillance over ordinary citizens. The latest crime bill proposes to retain the DNA profiles of people neither charged nor even arrested for any offence. What price Paine and Mill now?

Labour should deal urgently with the loss of trust in our parliamentary system, which threatens everything that socialists believe in. It should connect reform not narrowly with political or judicial elites but with the people. Admittedly, we can’t reform the appalling democratic deficit in Europe where covert manoeuvres for the election of the EU presidency made a smoked-filled room look like Aristotle’s Athens, though the Lisbon treaty does enhance the powers of national legislatures. Michael Foot used to claim that British parliamentary democracy was a cut above that of the Brussels bureaucrats. It hardly looks like that now. We should clearly democratise our own parliament, not just the Lords (who scrutinise and revise bills most thoroughly) but the Commons. We should act immediately on the admirable report of Tony Wright and his colleagues, Rebuilding the House, focusing on house select committees and the conduct of Commons business. The Commons should be reconnected with the people.

The ‘direct democracy’ championed by US progressives a century ago should be revived. There should be primaries for the selection of parliamentary candidates. There should be powers of recall for unsatisfactory MPs. There should be the ability to initiate business, by e-petitions as the Wright Committee proposed. If petitions procedure works well for the Scots in Edinburgh, why not in Westminster? As for electoral PR, too much is often claimed for this: it is, for example, hardly a recipe for financial abuse as the cases of Italy, Ireland and Israel variously show. But if the government were formally to propose a referendum on PR (ideally on election day) it would surely give Labour command of the debate. Finally, in local government, the party which gave London an elected mayor could surely extend the principle to our other cities. This was advocated in Progress last November by Andrew Adonis, a marvellously innovative minister in education and transport (and potentially a fine minister of justice?). It could be an essential building block in Labour’s programme of urban renewal, ‘municipal socialism’ reborn.

Labour should make civic engagement central to all its programmes. It should place equality of political power alongside equality of social power, as when the much-lamented John Smith called for a new citizens’ democracy. There is little sense of citizenship in modern Britain. We are very far from David Marquand’s vision of ‘democratic republicanism’. We remain legally subjects of the crown. We cannot say, as can the Americans, ‘We the people’. We retain arcane Tudor remnants of the royal prerogative. We flattened Baghdad in the name of a wholly innocent resident of Windsor. Democratic citizenship should be celebrated, free from the racial connotations of Sarkozy (and many on the left) in France. Setting this down in a formal written constitution would take up a huge amount of time and probably be divisive. Reform should be incremental, building on existing legislation.

Labour is ideally placed to take the lead, perhaps with the support of reformers among the Lib Dems and Plaid Cymru. The democracy of democratic socialism has always been as important as the socialism, as Tawney saw. The Tories have resisted every change since 1997: their paranoia over Europe makes them even poorer instruments of reform. A healthy democracy can only be built on the power of progressivism.