After a break-up, you have two options. There is reassurance: I did nothing wrong, it could have happened to anyone, I was a victim of circumstance. But then there is reappraisal: when you have to concede that the whole thing was at least partly – perhaps wholly – your fault.

Most of the political books, speeches, blogs, essays and tweets that have emerged on the left since 2010 can be firmly placed within the ‘Reassurance’ bucket. There is plenty to enjoy within this genre; the best example of which is probably Chavs, a book that moves, inspires and angers: but doesn’t stretch or challenge its reader at all.

A little reassurance is, from time to time, perfectly healthy, but it has to be accompanied with some meaningful self-reflection and at least a measure of reappraisal: Influencing Tomorrow, a new collection of essays on foreign policy edited by Douglas Alexander and Ian Kearns, director of the European Leadership Network, is probably the first and most significant contribution to the Reappraisal bucket since the 2010 election.

You can immediately tell that Influencing Tomorrow is a reappraisal text because there is something in it to irritate everyone. Liberal interventionists will be less than thrilled by Simon Adams’ chapter on responsibility to protect, civil libertarians will find little in Michael Clarke’s opening essay on counterterrorism to smile about, environmentalists will be upset by the candid pessimism of Jeffrey Mazo, while Mark Leonard’s chapter on the rise of China will depress almost everyone.

This is a very good thing. Labour has two persistent delusions, as dangerous as they are enjoyable. The first is that the great problems that face Britain can be fixed simply by electing a Labour government; the second is that the great problems that face Britain only began in 2010. David Cameron and William Hague have little to no idea how to change British foreign and security policy to meet the challenge of a rising China; successive foreign secretaries under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did little better. For Britain and China, read the deficit, or falling wages.

Even those problems which can be laid almost entirely at a blue door – thankfully, Euromania has yet to cross the species barrier from Tory to Labour – will not be wished away by a red tide. That the only thing that Conservative ministers are looking for in Europe is a way out will hamper Labour’s efforts on everything from cybercrime to patents to tax evasion. George Osborne’s ‘wasted years’ will not bring about the end of austerity – they will actually lengthen them, as falling tax receipts mean there is less money to spend.

Influencing Tomorrow is intended to form something of a summary of an incoming foreign secretary’s intray. It is brilliant, well researched, and in many aspects acutely depressing. Labour needs more of the same and, in an ideal world, progressives with large bookshelves would be able to collect an entire set from the shadow cabinet, but, in the meantime, thinking leftwingers can content themselves with Transforming the Market, a slim volume by Patrick Diamond, released this week by Civitas, and, alongside Influencing Tomorrow, should serve as the foundations for Labour’s next government.

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Transforming the Market is released on 13 November 2013.
Influencing Tomorrow is out now.

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Stephen Bush is a contributing editor to Progress, writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb

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Influencing Tomorrow: Future Challenges for British Foreign Policy
Douglas Alexander and Ian Kearns (Eds)
Guardian Books | 224pp | £12.99