New Labour liked to make the public service reform agenda something where you were either onboard or you were a wrecker. With all the Labour leadership candidates promising a greater voice for the party and a stronger policymaking role for conference, perhaps those day are gone for good.

Defeat has allowed Labour’s would-be leaders the chance to confess where the reform agenda went wrong. Ed Balls says New Labour went wrong when the reform agenda contrasted market based reforms of the public sector with small ‘c’ conservatism among resistant public service workers and unions. Ed Miliband says it was because Labour became too managerial and technocratic in both its language and policy. Andy Burnham says Labour was seduced by the glamour of the private sector. David Miliband says Labour lost the compelling articulation of aspiration and hope that came from bold plans for reform.

A reform agenda has never been more needed than now. A new collection of essays produced by Soundings and the Open Left project at Demos has scoped out some common ground between those once seen as the reformers and the wreckers. Instead of being a divide between the old left and new right, Labour’s debate is becoming defined by the difference between pluralists and centralisers.

In this new collection of essays, James Purnell argues that Labour needs to become “bold reformers of the state and the market”. He accepts that “because we were too hands off with the market, we became too hands on with the state”. He argues that New Labour’s attitude to globalisation “too often sounded to voters like they were on their own”. The lesson of the last election, he writes, is that Labour had stopped sounding like reformers and that globalisation became “the way New Labour told the Labour Party it couldn’t have what it wanted”.

David Lammy argues that Labour lost its reforming zeal and that a new reform agenda should be based not on the New Labour dictum that ‘what matters is what works’ because, he says, “‘what matters’ is more important than ‘what works'”. Philip Collins describes an “iron cage” that Labour found it impossible to escape, in which the best method for changing the country was seen as a combination of public money and the central state. Instead, he argues for a reform agenda that places power “at the lowest possible point”.

These arguments sit comfortably alongside a piece by Neal Lawson, in which he argues that New Labour’s failing was trying to reform the state to “accommodate the Thatcherite revolution but with a progressive twist”. He warns against both “state fundamentalism” and “market fundamentalism”. He accepts that the state “does crowd out. It does make us dependent and powerless.” His acceptance that reform is needed and that a centralised state can disempower the citizen, is an important progressive concession and opens the door for mutuals and civic society. His argument is developed by Jonathan Rutherford who calls for a “covenant politics” based on the “ethic of reciprocity” to guide a reform agenda for the market.

So Labour’s reform agenda could be based on some common ground. The public service reform agenda might find expression in the principle of mutualism and on giving users and workers a stake in the functioning of services. At the same time, a reform agenda in global markets and corporate governance might bring firms under greater stakeholder control – agendas recently embraced by Ed Miliband and David Miliband respectively. MiliBritain is beginning to take shape.

As James Purnell argues, “we lost because we stopped being reformers, or where we were, because we stopped talking about our reforms”. There is no progressive politics without reform but a more widely shared acceptance of Labour’s next reform agenda is surely vital in helping Labour win again.