In January, the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, addressed the annual conference of the Fabian Society. His speech was a prolonged mea culpa for the sins of New Labour in government. To those who had deserted it at the 2010 general election, the party, he said, appeared to have been “in thrall to a vision of the market that seemed to place too little importance on the values, institutions and relationships that people cherish the most”. The remedy? “Rooting our values in traditions and ideas that go beyond the bureaucratic state and the overbearing market.”
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