The People’s Assembly was an event for people who think that listing things you do not like in increasingly emotive terms will lead inevitably to the triumph of the things you do like.

The day opened with a worthless plenary, but opening plenaries are always worthless unless there is a free breakfast or Andrew Adonis is involved. It was in the session on Britain’s housing crisis that you could really sense the underlying problems with the People’s Assembly: we heard about the assault on squatters’ rights, resisting evictions, and opposing the bedroom tax, but the only time the word ‘build’ was used was in reference to the movement itself.

Things went from bad to worse at a session entitled ‘Welfare not Warfare?’. It is almost inevitable that at any big political discussion, there will be one breakout with a title that does not so much lead by the nose as grab by the short and curlies, but this left them all in the shade. Well-known neoconservative warhorses such as Salma Yaqoob (formerly of Respect and Stop the War), Lindsey German (formerly of Respect and Stop the War) gathered together to discuss a dichotomy that was not so much false as completely fraudulent.

That was the biggest problem with the whole day: it’s not that Yaqoob, German and the rest of the panel would rather spend money on childcare than Exocet missiles (I suspect a panel featuring Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice would come to similar decisions), it’s that they genuinely believe that the reason why there were still poor people after 13 years of Labour rule is that Tony Blair was too busy committing war crimes to focus on social policy; they think that the reason why governments do bad things is that they are led by bad people.

The problem for Labour, though, is that the People’s Assembly is a great way for us to feel good about ourselves. Just as the obese person on the Overground makes me feel better about the half-completed gym membership in my rucksack, the beam in the hard-left’s eye makes us ignore the mote in ours.

Just because we wouldn’t do something so witless and myopic as to describe an event where leftist sects outnumbered black people as representing ‘a broad cross-section of the country’ doesn’t make Progress Political Weekend or the Young Fabian Boat Party any less male or pale. Those leading, comfortable questions might appear bold when compared to ‘Welfare or Warfare?’, but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that, all too often, we discuss the issues we want to in the language we want to.

And, most of all, while we might do it in a manner less hysterical than the hard-left, we often talk about David Cameron or Nick Clegg in a way that is no less than farfetched and farcical than those who think that Blair belongs in the Hague. As emotionally satisfying – and politically rewarding – as it might be to think and act otherwise, austerity is not happening because Cameron is an evil man.  It is the natural result of a reduced tax base, sluggish growth, and a mountain of private debt. Frequently, the coalition has made the wrong choices, but it has been choices made in the face of difficult circumstances that Labour will inherit in 2015.

That’s the reality that the Eds are now moving Labour towards; that’s not surrender to ‘the austerity consensus’. That’s about tackling the economic reality of 2015 as we will actually find it, not the world we would have liked to build in 2010. It’s about accepting that many of the decisions the government has made were made not because they wanted to, but because they had to. That’s where Ed Miliband is heading: and that’s where the rest of us should follow.

———————————————————