Last year Ed Miliband's conference speech galvanised the Labour party and began reshaping the political consensus. With "one nation", that single striking phrase, he was able to offer a critique of the existing social order under the Tories, while simultaneously offering the hope of a better one under Labour. Its great achievement was to be both radical and conservative: it provided an alternative political economy that spoke to contemporary concerns over the economic crisis, living standards and the nature of change, without retreating into nostalgia.
As any historian will tell you, "one nation" is far from a new phrase. Stolen – as Ed was the first to acknowledge – from Benjamin Disraeli, arguably the Conservative party's most celebrated champion of the aspirant class, this is an idea with a clear and defined political lineage.
As we approach what can often feel like Victorian levels of inequity today, it is quite natural that we look to this era for political inspiration. But the question remains: why one nation? The reason is that, on so many levels, it is Disraeli's analysis that best chimes with our own.
Despite signs that we may be finally clambering out of recession, we remain in the eye of a volatile economic storm, brought about by excessive faith in the economic orthodoxies of neoliberalism. And what makes Disraeli so interesting is that he, like Ed Miliband, believed in a moral conception of society beyond the narrow confines of the marketplace.
It is one of the fundamental lessons we must learn from our recent experience of government: there is only so much you can do to improve the conditions of working people without also changing the underlying structure of the economic model itself.
Today the pace of change wrought by globalisation has created a sense of loss and dislocation in many of our communities. The last Labour government sometimes failed to respond to this anguish in anything other than the most urgent economic terms; sometimes we appeared to belittle the concerns of those who were fearful of the pace of change, or longed for stability and order.
We must learn from all this and avoid the pitfalls of "monetary transfer social justice", which doesn't do enough to challenge existing structures and concentrations of power. The materialist coalition, of course, is utterly incapable of learning such lessons, as it eagerly sets about privatising every public good for which it can find a buyer.
There is a further important way in which the one nation idea is both conservative and radical. When Ed Miliband gave his speech in Manchester last year, he offered a clear and renewed commitment to Labour's historic crusade of lifting the life chances of working people. On this he was absolutely unequivocal: inequality matters. Too great a distance between the two nations harms social cohesion and undermines our sense of solidarity, ultimately impoverishing us all.
Any lingering pretence of commitment to the kind of growth that is of benefit to the majority rather than a tiny rich minority was finally abandoned by George Osborne in the 2013 budget. We need growth that reduces inequality, delivers more secure work, is more environmentally sustainable and, above all, benefits the regions outside London and the south-east. And this approach is not driven solely by a concern for social fairness: Miliband's one-nation economy will enable us to succeed as a country, and create a recovery that is made by the many and – this time – built to last.
Widening the discussion about what kind of growth we need points to further ways in which our old political economy is lacking: it is unable to offer answers to the basic questions that Miliband has placed at the heart of Labour policy in these tough times: how can we make a difference in a restricted economic climate; how can we change society?
These questions perhaps make the last idea in the one-nation trilogy – predistribution – the most important one for us to grasp. Of course Labour can be proud of our redistributive legacy, and the fact that our tax credits helped to take a million children out of poverty. And redistribution will obviously remain part of the Labour way of delivering fairness. But we need to look beyond that to predistribution.
Our opponents have poured scorn on this idea. But Britain needs new ideas. We need to find ways of ensuring that economic power and the proceeds of growth are more evenly spread throughout the economy before redistribution.
This is a significant challenge to the traditional political methodology of social democracy. A predistributive approach gives primacy to reform. Out go flashy new ways of spending money and in come smart, inexpensive interventions that have the power to reshape the existing rules of the market.
Perhaps the best example is our approach to social security and housing. We must be prepared to shift the focus of social security spending from benefits to bricks and mortar – to building houses, not lining the pockets of rentier landlords. Although this is a hard task, there are grounds for qualified optimism. That is because many of the answers to the challenges of our current political context – globalisation, fiscally responsible change, the rejuvenation of our political culture – can be found within the uniquely Labour contribution to social democracy.
The answers lie in the movement itself: for in becoming too reliant on the state as the means of mitigating market outcomes, we have neglected our associationalist heritage as a movement of democratic grassroots activists: our history of co-operatives, mutual societies and trade unions. It is by rediscovering this heritage, that Labour can begin to put "the future in its bones", as Eric Hobsbawm memorably put it (after CP Snow).
So, while we are deeply indebted to Disraeli for the lucidity of his analysis, and can find a common cause with his dream of a Britain united, the energy to realise our one-nation vision and transform our communities from the bottom up, is all our own.