Joyce McMillan - Troubled times require more respect for the state

ON TUESDAY, the Prime Minister stood up at the Labour Party conference in Manchester to make what was widely advertised as the most important speech of his life, yet, just four days on, it's worth asking how much any of us can really remember about it.

We know, if we've read the headlines, that he said this was no time for a novice to be in charge, and that everyone wondered whether he meant the Tory leader David Cameron, or his bizarre-looking young Labour rival David Miliband. We know that his wife Sarah got up to introduce him, in a high-risk American-style gesture so well handled by the impressive Mrs Brown that it seems to have won many hearts.

And we also know that the content of the speech, and the debate about its success or failure, was soon overshadowed by the sudden resignation of the Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, amid a flurry of speculation about her motives. In other words, we know next to nothing about the actual political content of the speech, and – thanks to a broadcast media now almost incapable of focussing on any aspect of politics except the rise and fall of individual politicians – almost everything about the supposed party manoeuvrings that surrounded it, some of them largely imaginary.

All of which is a pity. Because this week has seen one of those historic moments when western politics undergoes a major ideological paradigm-shift, on a scale not seen since the collapse of the post-war consensus 35 years ago, and Gordon Brown's speech represented a fascinating rough first draft of a response to the sudden change in mood.

It wasn't a great speech – it was full, for example, of the usual flat-footed New Labour detail about micro-improvements in public services. But by comparison with many of the Prime Minister's recent efforts, it also fairly glowed with a well- justified sense that in a crisis such as this, the last thing the nation needs is a return to government by a Conservative Party which has opposed every progressive change in British society for the past century, and which still instinctively peddles mistrust of government as a core ideological belief – this at a time when, as the frantic negotiations in Washington make clear, only very big government indeed can now bail the markets out of a horrendous mess of their own making.

It's no accident, in other words, that Gordon Brown's long-delayed attack on the Tories was both rhetorically and verbally the strongest part of his speech. In the current crisis, David Cameron's new "Tories-lite" are ideologically bankrupt, and they will have to turn on a presentational sixpence, at next week's conference in Birmingham, in order to catch the new current of public and financial opinion. For evidence that they could possibly succeed, though, Brown should be looking hard, this weekend, at the electrifying speech made in Toulon on Thursday by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, of course, is a president from the centre-right, so firmly dedicated to deregulating and "liberalising" the supposedly sluggish French economy that his political opponents sometimes call him "the American".

Yet in Toulon, he seized the moment in a way that Brown would never have dared to do. "The idea of an all-powerful market without any rules or political intervention is mad," he thundered. "Self-regulation is finished. Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that is always right is finished." And he added, most significantly, that in his view this was not a crisis of capitalism, but a crisis of a system which had betrayed the true values of capitalism, which should be based on an ethic of effort, and fair rewards. What Sarkozy has done, in other words, is to announce the end of the age of market fundamentalism, and the beginning of a new deal between governments and markets; a new age, ideally, in which both would treat the other with respect, as an essential player in delivering freedom, peace and prosperity.

Of course, it is shocking that it has taken a crisis on the scale of the events of the last two weeks to provoke any world leader into clearly articulating what has been obvious to many ordinary people for decades. But now, the shift has happened, and, in theory, this moment presents an obvious opportunity for leaders on the centre left, some of whom have been muttering for months about the need for a new balance between governments and markets. Hillary Clinton used the phrase during her primary campaign, and, on Tuesday, Brown spoke, although rather tentatively, about the need for markets to be servants of the people, rather than their masters.

But what is most ominous for New Labour in Britain – and also, perhaps, for the Democrats in America – is that so far, only a recently-elected leader from the right, in the shape of President Sarkozy, has had the confidence, and the political leeway, to cut through the ideological fudge that has become second nature to the current generation of centre-left leaders, and to make, in clear and explicit terms, the leftward move towards a greater respect for the role of the state that the times obviously demand.

It remains to be seen whether Cameron's Tories will aim to replicate this effect in Birmingham next week, and whether, if they do, they will be able to embrace the new age with as much conviction as President Sarkozy.

But strange times create strange ideological bedfellows, and brand-new political movements. Which is why next week's Tory conference should be the most interesting for years, provided, of course, the media consent to tell us about the ideas under discussion, instead of dwelling on the unassailability of Cameron's leadership, or the relative warmth of the public kiss bestowed upon him by his wife Samantha, as compared with the one the Browns exchanged in Manchester this week.