In The Third Man I said the TB-GB-PM era of New Labour is over – it died on May 6 last year. Don’t think party is served by any of us spending time rolling out greatest hits from decade after 1997 because the country has moved on. It is a task for the new generation to reinvent New Labour for a new decade, not to dwell on it or re-heat it.

If I talk about past it is to learn from it, not to go back to it.

My experience was of modernising the party at all levels in 1980s and 1990s which was like draining a swamp. Although the 2010 defeat was numerically worse than ‘brilliant defeat’ of 1987 where I cut my teeth, and therefore the challenge for Labour is similarly fundamental, at least we have gained the experience of undertaking fundamental change since then and knowing we can do it.

When say modernise at all levels, mean it: party organisation, policy renewal, use of media, funding. And above all realigning our instincts and outlook with those of the British people.

We have to go to where the public are, having allowed ourselves to drift away from them in last few years of our government. People take their politics from the issues they care about – jobs and unemployment, immigration and asylum, health and the NHS, schools, cost of living, pensions and poverty, law and order. In these issues people find meaning to politics so this is where we need to locate our own answers/ideas. Knowing our audience is fundamental.

Ed has rightly spoken of the pressures on the ‘squeezed middle’. I am glad – but I got there before him. If some had spent more time reading my book than reacting to it last summer they would have discovered this verdict on New Labour in the epilogue: ‘… In our final years in office, when economic times were tough, too many voters thought that while they were working hard and paying their dues, the government was working for others: bankers, immigrants, benefit recipients, or those we were helping in far-off foreign conflicts. What these voters meant by fairness was fair rules on immigration, welfare and housing – issues on which they felt we were either now speaking a different language than we had in 1997 or no longer had anything to say at all… We had also stopped addressing the aspirations of people who made their own way in life, and wanted to retain more of their income to do so’.

So, I agree with the thrust of Ed’s recent policy speech. If the first task of recovery is to identify your target audience, he is on track.

It is why who represents and speaks for our party is also fundamental. We have to sound and look like a genuinely national party drawn from every region and social background and not just ex-political assistants, researchers and trade union apparatchiks recruited from inside the Westminster bubble.

This, incidentally, is one of the reasons the coalition government is coming unstuck. There is an emotional elitism or deficit about them which is a bigger issue than whether they are rightwing ideologues or shallow salesmen. People trust Cameron due to his ease with authority and his (early) decisiveness, but they feel uneasy about the sense of detachment he has developed, both from them and increasingly from the actions of his own government. He doesn’t seem to understand the consequences of their actions – you can see this in the NHS car crash. He does not seem so rooted in the reality of people’s everyday lives. This is not just about class and it’s about more than ‘cuts’.

When I talk about party renewal, this is not just about engaging with members. It means reprofessionalising the party at all levels. We may not be in the position where, as I discovered when I went to Walworth Road in 1985, people at party HQ were apparently trying to poison others with rat poison – nowhere near it – but there is nonetheless a big job to do in reprofessionalising the party machine.

The Millbank machine of the 1990s has been allowed to wither on vine. This is not fault of party workers in Victoria Street who are every bit as professional as ones I worked with in the 1990s. But over a long period in office, we saw senior politicians focus on government, neglecting the renewal of the party machine. Part of this is funding but more to do with us taking eye off the need to update party as we did to get us into government. Take one example. One of the core developments in our renewal was the institution of a business liaison unit at the heart of the Millbank HQ – a core part of how we rebuilt relations with business. But that was allowed to wither and eventually fold – one reason why we gradually lost business support to the point where it was negligible in 2010 election.

Genuine root-and-branch party reform should include primaries, CLPs should have real freedom to experiment with membership drives and supporters’ networks, linking our policy development with the work of our councillors and others on the ground. New Labour did not develop this enough.

The party needs to revolutionise its funding sources. This is not a coded attack on the trade unions. The truth is without them we would not exist. But we cannot let this situation persist. We have to develop smarter ways of raising money. We have to combine the latest technical solutions with community engagement to open up new sources of cash. What are we doing to raise money from legacies? What are we doing to encourage foundations to give to institutions who support our values? How can we extend the political levy to other areas?

Just as 24-hour digital media has proliferated and fragmented to reach many more target audiences, so must our communications. It is about more than how we disseminate our message, but how it can be shaped by two-way interaction with the public. Modern technology allows us to have much more of a conversation, a two-way engagement which should feed in to policy.

When I was director of communications, my task was relatively straightforward. Get a decent story on the Today programme, make sure the BBC is in the right place for 6pm and 9pm and ITV onside for 5.40 and 10pm. Ring around the lobby. And that was it. Today, with newspaper circulation falling, with TV viewers diversifying we’re in a totally different place. This is not about paying lip-service to the internet. It is about a fundamental reassessment of how people receive information that informs their political choices. We need to be in front of them at the right place and right time – at the moment we aren’t.

We have embarked on hard grind of policy renewal. That means not shutting off any options for debate and not becoming captive to vested interests in the party or outside it. But lesson from 1980s and pre-1997 is that this renewal has to be done as a coherent whole if we are to be sure that policies all fit with aspirations and outlook of British people. Means combining a clear pro-market stance and economic aspiration with social justice, and ensuring that levels of personal taxation, and the balance between tax, spending and borrowing, are in line with these aspirations. That’s the only way we can be seen to be governing for whole country.

The combination of less public spending and communities being fragmented poses a challenge to us to sketch out the type of society we want to see and the balance between the state’s remit and people’s own responsibilities. What role we want people to play, beyond co-operative organisation or devolution important as these are, in delivering on their own concerns and priorities. In ASB, personal health, integration, sexualisation of children etc people need to be part of the solution. This can be encouraged by the state through early intervention and a greater contributory principle in welfare but we should be more explicit in the overlap – it is not a boundary – between the responsibilities of the state and the individual. ‘Rights with responsibilities’ is an eternal verity of our party, not a New Labour phrase.

This needs thinking about because providing much-improved public services when times were good was a core attraction of New Labour. How we continue to improve these services and lever up their productivity and responsiveness to individual need is going to be a huge challenge now that the economy is not growing in same way. People won’t support further tax and spend unless they can see clear value for money. Further enlarging public sector employment is not an option in the coming decade and therefore we need to look to the real economy, the private business sectors, to deliver sufficient numbers of decently paid, skilled jobs. We should have been operating much more active and broadly based industrial policies after 1997, policies to internationalise our economy and promote investment, exports and growth, rather than waking up to their urgent need after the global crisis of 2008.

The party needs to have a stronger view of Britain’s role in the world, without which you cannot have a view on the direction of our domestic economy. This is about the new division of production and labour in the world – jobs and opportunity – as well as key issues of energy and commodity supply. Modern foreign policy is not just about Libya and Afghanistan. It is about how we and Europe fit into new patterns and trends in the global economy and how we expect to make our way and earn our living in the 21st century both in competition and collaboration with others.

The last point is that infighting in any party is deeply corrosive. It all but killed Labour in the 1980s. When I took job as communications director in 1985 I spent more time on phone fending off attacks from and within our own party than from our opponents.

So let me say this about Ed. Our leader is a leader of the country, not of the party’s sections and factions, and it is to the country he needs to be given the space to prove himself. The leadership election is over. We support Ed. No ifs and buts. He is our leader, period. We need to spend less time talking to ourselves about Ed and more time talking to the country with smart ideas which reflect our values, that are broad, wide and realistic to show we understand the challenges the country faces and sufficiently innovative to command media and public attention. We are not a debating society but a political party and at all times we have to act like one.

ENDS
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