Freed from the workload of shadow ministerial brief, Tristram Hunt is clearly spending his time trying to contribute to Labour’s intellectual renewal. In the wake of Labour’s defeat in May, the Fabian Society’s Facing the Future programme has asked, ‘What would the Labour party look like if it were founded today’. To this Tristram Hunt’s speech to the Fabians sought to provide an answer: a ‘moral mission’ to tackle inequality and realise aspiration.

As Hunt outlined, Britain has the highest inequality of any European OECD country. Globalisation and automation are hollowing out of the middle of labour market, creating more of an hour-glass economy that widens inequality. The negative impact of inequality on society as a whole has been well documented by the likes of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level. With 3.7 million British children growing up in poverty and four million not properly fed, Hunt argued that tackling inequality should be Labour’s raison d’être in the 21^st century.

The main contention of Hunt’s speech was that ‘inequality impoverishes us all – including those at the top’ and that tackling it must be the focus of a political project that can be a ‘100 per cent strategy’. Hunt argued that while New Labour was pro-growth it too often turned a blind eye to inequality. Meanwhile, Miliband’s Labour was pro-equality at the expense of seeming pro-growth. Now, Labour must build a pro-growth and pro-equality agenda. As recent research by the IMF and OECD has argued, the two go hand in hand: higher equality boosts economic growth. Indeed, equality is a rising tide that lifts all boats.

Too often dialogue within the Labour party has focused on redistribution which offers paper-over-the-crack solutions to inequality. To be tough on inequality, we must be tough on the causes of inequality. To Hunt, this means investing in education to give young and older people the skills they need for the workplace, it means opening up job opportunities to those not fortunate enough to have personal connections and it means providing sustainable and affordable housing. Hunt also singled out universal childcare as a policy that cuts welfare bills, boosts maternal employment and reduces the cost of living – a policy providing a return on public investment and tackling inequality at the same time. As I recently argued in Progress, even on a conservative estimate such a policy could raise £28bn for the Treasury over four years. However, it should be focused on providing public childcare services for under-twos in particular, rather than tax breaks or subsidies. Hunt also called for an active labour market policy and investment in early years education to foster greater social mobility, but warned that Labour’s discussion about inequality needs to move beyond academic debate – scrapping phrases like ‘predistribution’ – so that we translate to the concerns and aspirations of people up and down the country.

Hunt also identified tax reform as a central part of a programme of tackling inequality. With echoes of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he called for a tax system that addresses the concentration of wealth in assets, particularly property. He argued that Labour should abolish council tax to be replaced by an annual 0.5 per cent tax upon the value of each property which research from IPPR suggests would completely cover the cost of replacing council tax. Reversing the Tories’ inheritance tax cut should also feature as part of these reforms. While the Tories have an ideological commitment to shrink the state, his argument maintained that Labour should not look to merely re-grow the state but create a state that taxes fairly and empowers people to realise their aspirations.

While not all of these ideas are new, what Hunt’s speech successfully did was to bring together different ideas to suggest a new progressive policy agenda for the Labour party that grows the economy and speaks to Labour’s ‘moral mission’ to reduce inequality of income, of gender and of social class. It is an agenda that seeks to reconnect to the party’s base support in working-class communities and simultaneously speak to middle-class swing voters, building a winning electoral coalition of lower- and middle-income earners who both have upwards aspirations. However, his argument may need to put greater emphasis on helping the latter if we are to win the marginal seats we lost in May. While Labour must surely find a better way to communicate Hunt’s vision than his description of ‘upstream socialism’, this was a speech designed to first convince Labour to go in the right direction before trying to convince the public.

A lot more work has to be done to flesh out policy ideas and translate these into plain English. Nevertheless, Hunt’s speech was an excellent signpost for Labour to build a winning policy agenda over the next five years that can put our values into practice. It is a signpost that the party’s leadership would be wise to follow if they want to build a winning policy programme for 2020.

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Edward Jones is a member of Progress. He tweets @EJCJones93