Not since Marie Antoinette posed as a milkmaid at Versailles has there been such an attempt to create a fantasy world for the rich.
David Cameron’s blue-collar conservatism conjures up in the minds of credulous Tories a feudal idyll of faithful retainers. His loyal, industrious and contented staff, clothed in blue overalls, toil away in a park somewhere in the Cotswolds, or possibly on the outskirts of Manchester.
The Labour party cannot allow the country to go back to the 18th century, where human rights are trampled on, workers are pushed into poverty and the state reduced to rubble.
How have we, as an electorate, sleepwalked into this mad world? England always gets in trouble when it falls out with the Scots and with Europe. The Auld Alliance between Scotland and the continent is being resurrected.
Insecurity is what you get when you have shameless Tory leaders who care little for the country and are simply motivated by short-term gain.
The trouble with the election campaign was that the Labour party did not put forward anything very distinctive. People I spoke to on the doorstep in marginal seats simply did not understand what Labour offered – or what made us different from the Tories. That was true in both England and Scotland.
In places like Tilbury, there were streets of people who had been left behind and they trusted no one.
This is a crisis facing the centre-left all over Europe. It is not just a British problem, and we must be careful that we do not come up with a crude and brutal British answer, as we did in the 19th century.
It is time to think about what a truly modern society would look like. It has to be tolerant and open. It has to be a society which values a highly educated population and this should be a state-driven national mission. It has to have the most modern industries.
We need to be healthier and more productive through our lives. We need to be building sustainable housing and sustainable energy to create a society our children will be proud to live in.
It has to be a generous devolved society, where the centre lets go. And it has to be a country where men and women are equally represented in public life.
If we are mean and closed or allow the super-rich simply to use us all as cheap blue-collar labour, we face a grim future.
Unfashionable though it is to say this just now, Ed Miliband did some of the thinking about this. He simply did not know what to prioritise or how to put together the jigsaw pieces he threw up in the air together.
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Sally Gimson is a journalist and Labour councillor in the London borough of Camden. She writes the PMQs on Progress column and tweets @SallyGimson
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