"Miliband and Labour's main problem, according to Dolphin, is that "there is no new well-developed economic model - comparable to monetarism in the 1970s - sitting on the shelf waiting for him to pick it up and champion it.""

Nordic Social Democracy has been, not just sitting on the shelf, but positively thriving for many years. Those are the countries at the opposite end from Britain of every single one of the dozens of graphs in The Spirit Level showing a range of socio-economic indicators. How to get the best results out of capitalism has never been a mystery. The challenge is to defeat the vested interests and conventional wisdom that prevent us from getting there.

David - but there are elements to the 'Nordic Social Democracy' model that Ed M would never be able to sell to his party; profit making schools & greater private involvement in healthcare to name a couple.

Liam - maybe those elements work better in the substantive context of a social democratic political economy, rather than cherry-picked out of that context and transplanted into a very different neo-liberal landscape, as the Tories would like to do.

Private sector involvement in public service provision would be a lot less worrying a prospect under a properly-taxed, properly-regulated form of capitalism, with citizens protected by a proper social safety net.

Whatever system adopted, there will be a list of issues there is a consensus on. We should define the common issues and implement them. A starting list for basics that Labour and the Tories can agree on

- independent monatary policy
- afforable public sector/ no structural term deficit
- regulated fiscal policy with indepedent oversight (yep, I think this is on its way)
- long term sustainable economy with long term state support
- neutral or surplus balance of payments
- priority given to wealth creation over consumption (right wing: part of Miliband's new deal)
- taxing for wealth creation and fairness not taxing for the sake of taxing
- long term reduction of national debt (to de-risk the country and reduce the long term cost of debt)

We could have a council of people who are not biggots develop long term plans for the core list.

Miliband should also deifine the list where the Tories and Labour disagree which can be what the election is about.

How do you have a dialogue with the right?

After the Osborne emergency budget, Tory MP's where waving their order papers in the air.

I don't think we will see that for a bit.

The right have sleep walked into the current crisis, they are blaming everyone apart from themselves. The bank downgrades are on Osborne's watch, and has to face the music

the challenge of the future is try to follow gordon's original golden rules, i.e. when we have growth over trend rate (around 2%) then we must have a budget surplus - what this really means is that we don't play politics with the economy where sustainability is built into the system, we have lost all economic credibility in this area and balls is the wrong man - we need some sensible brains like alistair darling back.

we've made big mistake with tax credits when increasing the tax free threshold would help the poor and less well off - as well as the squeezed middle - we should look to increase the tax free allowance so that 50% of the population no longer needs to pay income tax - at the same time get rid of tax credits (we don't need to give back with one hand what we haven't taken with the other - and save enormous admin costs).

we need to look at making the UK the number one choice for startups and inward investment - we now have to compete with eastern europe, asia for investment in high tech areas - in addition rather than hand out subsidies for these areas it is much better to have a lower tax environment, we need to provide engineering courses without fees (full fees for arty/farty courses) and look to help our manufacturing sector too. reduce gov't spend on admin jobs yet increase gov't spending on infrastructure spending. the solutions are simple, we just need to be bold enough.