There is a mass movement in the nation right now. It is called Christmas shopping. Every public place is thronged, throbbing with the citizen-consumer. Some young people are assembling to protest against the lies of the Liberal Democrats over student fees. Others are sitting peacefully outside TopShop to highlight how this government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich is using as key advisers people whose relationship with taxation is highly creative. We are not all in it together and the ‘big society’ is daily excluding more and more as the nation becomes meaner.

But will this turn people onto politics? In 1947 George Orwell wrote a little book called ‘The English People.’ In it he noted:

‘Great numbers of adult English people have never in their lives bothered to vote in an election. In big towns it is quite common for people not to know the name of their MP or what constituency they live in.’

Orwell could be writing today. This is the reality the political class cannot face. Namely that the mass of our fellow citizens do not like us and do not want to take an active part in politics. It is not just a British phenomenon. The Israeli political scientist, Tamar Hermann, describes politics in his country thus:

‘Like many other democracies today, politics is often portrayed by the media as the ‘mother of all evil’… The 2010 Democracy Index (showed) half the respondents supported the statement that politicians got involved in politics mainly to serve their own personal interest.’

Two-thirds of Israeli citizens do not trust their parliament or minister and only half trust the Supreme Court. It may be noted in passing for the benefit of electoral reformers that Israel operates under the kind of proportional representation system much advocated by sincere constitutional reformers in the UK. The idea that the AV referendum will produce a result that endorses Nick Clegg after he has demonstrated that coalition government equals the betrayal of solemn pledges is now laughable. Politics is not about electoral systems but something else. There is no answer on offer to what that something else is. But finding an answer is now Labour’s supreme task. Orwell in the same essay offers some clue:

‘The great mass of the people want profound changes, but they do not want violence. They want to preserve their own standard of living, and at the same they want to feel that they are not exploiting less fortunate peoples. If you issued a questionnaire to the whole nation, asking, ‘What do you want from politics?’, the answer would be much the same in the overwhelming majority of cases. Substantially it would be, ‘Economic security, a foreign policy which will ensure peace, more social equality … But few people would think it necessary to mention either capitalism or socialism.’

Sadly there is no Orwell writing such common sense in 2010. The best idea on offer from one of the new generation of Labour MPs is from Stella Creasy. She argues that Labour should take a ‘gap year’, suspend all the boring meetings and publications and go away and read loads and talk loads and meet loads of people.

We have a long four and a half year haul in front of us. Cameron and the Liberal Democrats will get through the student fee vote just as Tony Blair did. But the country has changed and David Cameron and Nick Clegg look more like Dan Quayle than Tony Blair. There is a new mood as many young people are no longer satisfied with the Thatcher-Blair settlement. But many still are as they fill the Apple and Jack Wolfskin stores and do not even know that 100 yards away Top Shop is being picketed.

Labour has to appeal to the iPad generation of app-obsessed downloaders who are more consumerist than any previous generation and, at the same time, harness the energy and rage of students and schoolchildren as well as TopShop protestors.

Finding the language to do that is not easy. The Tory media dump on Ed Miliband is predictable. There is little point Labour mounting every barricade or launching Dieppe or Gallipoli type assaults in the Commons when the enemy citadel cannot be breached until 2015 at the earliest. Stella Creasy is right. Labour needs to take time off and come back refreshed after a year of thinking, reading, talking and listening. Thumping the despatch box is less relevant than ever. The shadow cabinet could be usefully reconstituted into project teams rather than living in the silos of government-Whitehall organisation. Miliband is right to focus on policy reviews. But why not go further and ask whether the dreary convention of a shadow cabinet which was invented by Churchill when opposition leader after 1945 may not hinder rather than help Labour rethinking and then, fingers crossed, reinventing politics?

Photo: David Jones