It would be wrong to characterise New Labour as offering none of this. A party which is promising to eliminate child poverty within a generation, is building up public investment and which has created parliaments in Scotland and Wales can hardly be described as being out of touch with the progressive tradition. But it shrinks from being an articulate champion of the public realm, of public initiative, of the primacy of the social, of a more vital democracy. This might frighten what it still believes is a conservative electorate. Its reward will be a poor turn out, with perhaps only a third of the under-25s bothering to vote.
New Labour has an alarming incapacity to win our hearts and minds.
Its competence in government will be rewarded by a second term, but it will not win the mandate it wants. For that it should blame its own refusal to be true to what it must believe.