If Gordon Brown’s timid continuation of the New Labour project has demonstrated anything, it has underlined just how far British politics has become de-ideologised.

No longer do the mainstream parties fight on the basis of competing visions for society, even to the limited extent that they did in the late 1980s, let alone the period of polarisation between Thatcherism and Bennism that immediately preceded the Kinnock years.

Instead, both New Labour and the Tories have cohered around a post-Thatcherite settlement, and are seeking to be elected on the basis of their greater managerial competence and the projection of the personalities of their respective leaderships in the mass media.

That such a state of affairs can have prevailed since at least 1994 does have some sobering implications for Britain’s political left. It implies that class politics can no longer be regarded as some sort of equilibrium state, or any kind of ‘golden mean’ to which politics inevitably reverts in the longer term.

Yet there are voices within the Labour Party who are unhappy with this situation, and not just unreconstructed Old Labourites, either. The clearest expression of this is support garnered by Jon Cruddas in his unsuccessful bid for the deputy leadership last year.

There is no organised Cruddasite current within Labourism; the potential figurehead seems almost anxious not to organise his base. But others appear willing to do it for him.

For instance, Neal Lawson – someone I remember as a swivel-eyed New Labour true believer in the mid-1990s – now seems to have founded the pressure group Compass expressly to act as the Church of John Cruddas of Latter Day Social Democrats.

Some of Lawson’s criticisms of New Labourism are on the money. The points he makes in his recent contribution to Comment is Free are all ones with which those of us left intellectually formed by Marxism would not demur. Lawson blasts Brown for his Blairism, and explains why that brand of politics is historically exhausted:

The reason Blair went was because his political project had ended in failure. A combination of the war, spin, sleaze, misguided public service and a refusal to face up to new challenges – like the growing loss of traditional Labour support – meant that the party had to change – not just the leadership but its direction.

More Blairism won’t address the growing inequality gap and the untouchables at the top of society. It won’t protect agency workers or stop the rise in prison numbers. It has nothing to say about the anxiety and insecurity caused by the freedom of global capital to wreak havoc on our lives because it won’t address these sources of unaccountable power. It won’t revive our ailing democracy.

Ultimately, Blairism will put the needs of the economy before those of society and therefore invert the principle of social democracy. Will Brown?

What Lawson doesn’t address, though, is how this political logjam can be broken. The entire history of the twentieth century indicates that established political consensuses can and sometimes do expire. But they tend to do so only rarely, and then almost always under the pressure of major historical events.

It is difficult to imagine what could bring about the sort of shift in the tectonic plates evidenced by the elections of, say, Attlee in 1945 or Thatcher in 1979.

Even if we were to witness an economic rerun of the 1930s – and one or two bourgeois commentators have speculated on just that possibility in recent weeks – the lack of a mass leftwing movement and the decline in elementary class consciousness would make the situation rather more likely to favour the nationalist right than the socialist left.

But the positive merit of politicians such as Cruddas and Lawson is their willing to reassert the basic point there is an alternative to neoliberalism. That is an important starting point.

Cross-posted from Dave’s Part