Renewal editors reflect on the meaning of social democracy

Renewal is a journal of social democracy, but social democracy has always been a contested concept - and one understood variously as an ideology, a movement, a historical phenomenon, or even a desired end-goal. Here, Renewal editors past and present reflecton what social democracy means to them.

Ben Jackson: Social democracy is more than a pragmatic compromise

One difficulty with being a social democrat is that it can appear to be a desiccated, pragmatic, compromised form of politics. Leszek Kołakowski famously defined social democracy as ‘an obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions which produce avoidable suffering, oppression, hunger, wars, racial and national hatred, insatiable greed and vindictive envy’. It’s a beautiful line, which brilliantly evokes social democracy’s gradualism and realism. But I do think we can say something stronger than that if we want to grasp the positive attractions of social democratic ideals. 

First, it offers us a historical affiliation with the political traditions of the labour movement. In particular, social democracy is the legatee of those working class leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who formed political parties, trade unions and cooperatives in order to universalise the slow, inconsistent emergence of liberal constitutionalism and democratic citizenship rather than to pursue a revolutionary insurrection. They believed that, once the political rights of a propertied minority had begun to give way to a broader franchise, the mass of the people themselves had to be won over to the cause of socialism through positive democratic political achievements rather than violent upheaval. 

Second, social democracy rests on a political theory that affirms core liberal ideals about the freedom and equality of the individual, but emphasizes that these goals remain inaccessible to many without substantive reform to a capitalist system that concentrates ownership and economic power in the hands of a few; creates massive disparities in the distribution of resources and opportunities; and permits the interests of employers to dominate the sphere of production. 

Third, while social democrats believe that such reform can be brought about through democratic collective action, both by the state and in civil society, social democracy also prescribes some flexibility about the precise strategy to be followed in the pursuit of a more equal society. The reform of capitalism requires careful attention to the changing social and economic context and intellectually honest reflection on the most plausible policy tools to deploy in the service of equality. While this sometimes leads to unattractive political opportunism, it is also the reason that social democracy has been able to transcend its specific historical formation among the industrial working class of Western Europe in the early twentieth century and remain a live political option into the twenty-first century, even as capitalism itself has been transformed by deindustrialisation and globalisation.

In-depth debate about the best policy options, and the trade-offs involved, are an essential part of a successful social democratic politics, and must draw on social scientific and historical research as well as normative ideals. These are the debates that have of course long been Renewal’s stock-in-trade. I look forward to reading it under the new editorial team as they grapple with Labour’s strategic dilemmas in government today.

Ben Jackson is Professor of Modern History at Oxford University. He edited Renewal from 2012-2015.

Craig Berry: Social democracy is not what you think it is

Social democracy is borne of socialist ideology, and it remains possible to adhere to versions of both perspectives (as many social democrats do). But social democracy should be understood as a distinct creed: a close relative, obviously, but not simply socialism’s softer or more sensible sibling.

Many social-democratic sympathisers see it as an ideological compromise, combining personal freedoms with egalitarian values, and economic efficiency with social justice. This pragmatism gives rise, apparently, to commitments to a mixed economy, the welfare state, or greater representation for the working class within parliamentary democracy. This is wishful thinking. Social democrats in power are as likely to dilute and dismantle these practices and institutions, as they are to develop and embed them.

Social democracy is not an anti-capitalist perspective. But nor is it necessarily a pro-capitalist perspective. Social democrats don’t really see capitalism, in the sense that they do not problematise the relationship between those who own capital and those whose subsistence depends on it (the ongoing complexification of this relationship notwithstanding).

What is often missed, by analysis that over-states its socialist lineage, is that social democracy is concerned with the public realm, not private enterprise. The core diagnosis of social-democratic ideology is that a centralised state is both inevitable and required to organise or underpin society. Acknowledging liberal ideals, this state must represent the interests of those it serves. But social democracy is in some ways an anti-democratic perspective, insofar as it recognises the risks as well as benefits of checking state power through parliamentary democracy. 

The influence of nineteenth century European nationalism on the nature and nurture of social-democratic thought and practice has been significantly under-stated. Essentially, social democracy drew upon the raw ingredients of socialism – specifically the notion of collectivism – to broker an uneasy truce between nationalism and liberalism. Its preoccupation ever since has been on governance, leaving the struggle behind.

In Britain, the Labour Party and social democracy are irredeemably intertwined, with both developing to provide labour movements with an animating paradigm for praxis beyond industry. Labour is a creature of social democracy, and as such it is focused on how state power can be obtained and exercised. The party’s social-democratic DNA is the reason the party’s broad church spans from elements of the far left, to what we now call neoliberalism. The adoption even of elements of far-right politics is, sadly, not the aberration it might appear to be. Social democrats don’t agree with each other on what society or the economy should look like, but they tend to agree on how the relevant decisions should be made.

‘Croslandite’ social democracy, emerging in the 1950s, is still seen by many as the ideology’s touchstone, but it is widely misunderstood. The point of modernisation was not to find a sweet spot between capitalism and socialism, but rather between social-democratic practice and socialist principle – with the Attlee government having failed to hold onto state power. The third way was based instead on a rejection of socialism, as it accommodated neoliberal ideology, but this did not make it any less social-democratic. Accommodating neoliberal economics has necessitated – or even been facilitated by – a huge expansion of social-democratic technocracy. 

‘Starmerism’ is what’s left after neoliberalism’s collapse: the Labour leadership is now nothing but social-democratic, focused above all on retooling the machinery of government.

All ideologies host tensions, and for social democracy, class is the main source of anxiety. The ontological core of socialist ideology is problematic when translated by a perspective concerned predominantly with national governance, of which maintaining social order (and therefore class-based inequalities) is a pre-requisite. The third way pretended that “we are all middle class now”, but with market utopianism discredited, the contemporary Labour Party must appeal vacuously to “working people”. There is a recognition of the need for a political identity rooted in class, but social democracy boiled down to its purest essence is unable to connect with or even conceptualise the actually-existing working class.

The Starmer leadership’s ongoing dalliance with ‘Blue Labour’ reveals rather than resolves social democracy’s torment in this regard. For some social democrats, Blue Labour’s simplistic account of working-class conservatism provides a rationalisation for anti-socialist and ant-liberal posturing. But Blue Labour is best understood as a social-democratic distress call, not a serious set of ideas.

We need to reject the crude distinction between ideology and pragmatism. Unlike New Labour, the contemporary Labour Party is able to be pragmatic on economic policy precisely because it is led by a true-believing social democrat, interested not in the economy per se but only in overseeing the economy. But this comes at a cost: a reluctance to draw upon policy ideas arising from other progressive traditions, and an inability to articulate who and what a social-democratic government is for. 

Social democracy is an immensely valuable perspective for the left, because all roads to progress pass through the state, and social democrats are uniquely able to think through the challenges of governing well. But social-democratic ideas alone are not, and have never been, sufficient to transform society.

Craig Berry is a public policy practitioner and writes The Political Economy Blog (where a longer version of this essay is available). He co-edited Renewal from 2023-2025. 

David Klemperer: A gradualist socialism that is both post-Marxist and post-liberal

As a historian, I understand "social democracy" to mean the majority of the international labour movement which, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, refused to follow Lenin’s disastrous deviation down the path of authoritarian vanguardism, but instead stayed true to the original Marxist vision of gradual progress towards democratic socialism. To be a social democrat today means to advance a form of socialist politics emerging from that gradualist and democratic tradition, for which social democratic parties and trade unions remain the primary political vehicle.

What does this mean in ideological terms? Social democracy, like other ideologies of the left, is committed to freedom, equality, and solidarity. But what makes it distinctive is its complex  relationship to Marxism and liberalism – the two traditions from the interstices of which it emerged. For me, to be a serious social democrat today should mean to be simultaneously a post-Marxist and a post-liberal – with the "post" signifying not rejection, but a constructive progression beyond.

Let's take Marxism first. It was Marxism that gave socialist labour movements their first coherent doctrines and formative analytical tools. Social democratic politics has always been informed by the Marxist insight that it is the development of capitalism that creates and conditions the possibilities for socialist politics. From Eduard Bernstein to Gordon Brown, revisionist social democratic projects have always been underpinned by new analyses of capitalism’s dynamics.

Today, in the age of platforms and AI, the basic Marxist analysis of how capitalism drives incredible technological progress while producing immiseration, alienation, and dangerous concentrations of wealth and power remains as relevant as ever. So too does a Marxist conception of politics as a clash between social forces and material interests created by capitalism itself. 

But the social democratic vision goes beyond materialist economism. Social democrats understand human beings as driven by more than rational self-interest, recognising the role of sentiment, faith, and identity. Early and mid twentieth-century social democrats sought to organise workers not only on the basis of shared material conditions, but through ethical appeals to ideals of justice and feelings of social solidarity. Since the 1980s, social democrats have also looked beyond class to other axes of social conflict, with feminism in particular now rightly central to social democratic analyses.

What about liberalism? It was in part from liberalism that social democracy emerged. Social democrats embrace liberal principles of freedom and equality, and celebrate liberalism’s achievements in breaking down social hierarchies. Moreover, social democrats defend liberal political institutions, which they rightly understand as the necessary framework for democracy and social justice. Contemporary “Red-Brown” experiments make it clearer than ever that anti-liberalisms of all stripes are a reactionary dead-end.

But if social democracy is (as Bernstein argued) liberalism’s legitimate heir, it is an heir that has always had ambitions of its own. Today, there are three strands in the social democratic tradition that should give it definition against the aridity and unpopularity of liberalism’s current forms. First, social democrats understand that abstract principles need to be applied concretely across all realms of life: political equality is undermined by concentrations of economic power, and human freedom is threatened by the expansion of market logics. To be a social democrat must imply a critique of capitalism and a commitment to decommodification.

Second, true to the Marxist side of their heritage, social democrats have long understood the conflictual nature of politics, which is neither a seminar-room debate nor the “marketplace of ideas” of liberal imagination. Contemporary social democrats must have a hard-headed analysis of power, and of the rival forces contending for it.

Finally, social democrats should aspire to create a kind of society beyond liberalism, and unlike liberals should be unafraid to articulate a thick vision of the common good. Social democracy must stand not for the abandonment of shared norms in favour of benevolent neutrality, but for the construction of newer and better norms, grounded in egalitarian principles. Social democracy has never been about individual autonomy, but rather about new forms of collective life conducive to individual flourishing.

David Klemperer is a historian and researcher. He has co-edited Renewal since 2025.

Emily Robinson: Why am I a social democrat? Not for this.

Not for the cuts, the intolerance, the timidity.

Is this simply the inevitable complaint? Pursuing parliamentary power means appeasing a reactionary electorate, means appealing to values that are not our own, means consolatory arguments about saving the nation from worse?

This has certainly been the social democratic dilemma of my lifetime – a politics caught between deference to, and defiance of, an electorate that is believed to be self-interested, punitive, resentful. Recent history suggests it would be naïve to ignore such assessments. These are dark times, in which social democrats are floundering.

And yet –

To be a social democrat is to believe that people are social, that they can and might make social choices – to defend those who need it most, to make life more equal and less precarious, to protect the planet – and not just when money can be spared.

During the pandemic, the historian Jon Lawrence argued in this journal that a strong tradition of ‘kneejerk social democracy’ is latent in British society, which surfaced in the assumption that the state should step up when individuals were struggling. Indeed, there were moments in those years when it seemed that it might be possible to go much further. Inequalities were brutally exposed, social goodwill was (briefly) high, and public appetite seemed like it could stretch beyond rebuilding to restructuring social and economic relations.

That moment was lost, and even tougher challenges are coming.

In order to meet them, we will need to develop a richer understanding of citizens as complicated people with conflicting views, who might express one thing while believing simultaneously in another, and who remain entangled in social relations and capable of caring about people different from themselves. I still believe that social democracy has the potential to be an emancipatory (and popular) position – but only if it stops assuming the worst of the people it needs to persuade. 

Emily Robinson is Professor of British Studies at the University of Sussex. She co-edited Renewal from 2020-23.

Eunice Goes: Social democracy is about emancipation in a society of equals united by bonds of solidarity

The task of defining social democracy should come easy to me. After all, I recently published a history of social democracy. But perhaps knowing that social democracy has been a contested concept since its emergence in the mid nineteenth-century rendered the task more difficult.

In 1848, when the concept of social democracy appeared for the first time, both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels disdainfully proclaimed it a bourgeois ideology but by the late 1860s they had changed their minds. Thanks in part to their dominant influence over the socialist movement Marx and Engels felt comfortable with the term. By then social democracy was seen as an ideology committed to the socialist revolution and overthrow of capitalism. But this definition of social democracy did not last very long. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, social democracy loses its revolutionary sting and by the 1950s it becomes clear that social democrats are no longer committed to overthrowing capitalism.

This turbulent journey left social democracy without a clear definition. As a result, this concept is either hurled as an insult directed at those who betrayed the socialist cause or is worn as a badge of honour by those committed to the cause.

Given this contested history perhaps the best way to define social democracy is to pare down its concept to its essential ideas and understand it as an ideology that is committed to a project of human emancipation that can only be achieved in a society of equals united by the bonds of solidarity.

But ideologies are not just enunciations of values; they also articulate a roadmap that takes us to that conception of the good society, which identifies obstacles and forbidden paths. Historically, social democrats identified capitalism as the greatest obstacle to the enactment of a social-democrat conception of society. Applying this insight to the twentieth-first means that for social democrats human emancipation can only be achieved if capitalism is, at the very least, tamed, and serves the common good.

Eunice Goes is Professor of Politics at Richmond, the American University in London. She co-edited Renewal from 2023-2025. 

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Have we ever been social-democratic?

In recent years, it’s become more and more common for historians of modern Britain to identify a period of ‘social democracy’ between c. 1945 and 1979; a period generally taken to be defined by Keynesian demand management, planning, corporatism, the welfare state, mass prosperity and falling inequality. It’s easy to see why this category has come to be prominent: it’s the positive to neoliberalism’s negative; a prelapsarian (pre-Thatcher) golden age for people on the left to look back on. “Look, we did it once before, we can do it again!”

The problem is that I don’t find neoliberalism to be a sufficient description – or explanation – of what has happened to Britain after 1979; and I don’t think ‘social democracy’ works that well, either, as a label for Britain from Attlee to Callaghan. Full employment, which was as much an effect of a Fordist economy as the Keynesian fine tuning of governments, did at least as much as the welfare state to bring widespread prosperity to Britain. Demand management was geared not just to full employment but, often, to maintaining the value of the pound. The welfare state was conceived in a liberal – minimal, insurance-based – vein. It’s instructive to recall the groups it marginalised or ignored. There were no benefits for the general classes of disabled people until the late 1960s. People of colour were systematically discriminated against in the NHS and education. Women, it was assumed, would mainly be housewives.

So I feel uncomfortable when I hear people on the left uncritically celebrate the postwar decades as the period where ‘social democracy’ was dominant in Britain. Social democracy was one ideological force that shaped these decades – but it was one force among many. And this was a golden age for some working-class people, sure, but mostly for those who were white, able-bodied, and heteronormative. We can – we need to – do better in future.

As a historian, I’m also wary of identifying any transhistorical core of beliefs that lies at the ‘true’ heart of an ideology. Ideological traditions are human constructs: they evolve over time. Claims to be defending the ‘one true version’ are usually just sallies in a political war. A more intellectually honest approach is clear that we could extract different things from the past, and that our choices are political ones. I’d pull out of the social democratic tradition(s) of the past: the goals of freedom, equality, and human flourishing; the desire to pool risks collectively, and to decommodify the essentials of life – from the environment to healthcare to information. We can, I think, mine the past for inspiration in the present – but we need to imagine the future afresh.

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite is associate professor of twentieth-century British History at UCL. She co-edited Renewal from 2016-2023.

Jack Jeffrey: Social democracy at its best was messy, plural, and alive

Because the political class is exhausted, aloof, and directionless, British politics is trapped in an endless cycle of negative partisanship. An embittered and volatile electorate now punish politicians and parties as reflexively as they endorse them. And with each failure to satisfy the public, political time accelerates such that crises compound rather than resolve. Accordingly, after winning a commanding majority, the same forces that swept Labour to power are now blaming them for the country’s paralysis.

To talk about the meaning of social democracy in this context should mean accepting its share of the blame for the pervasive feeling that meaningful change is impossible. It has failed to distinguish itself from the centrism it once challenged, and too often capitulated to a detached, albeit benevolent, managerialism. Meanwhile, a new form of right-wing politics, emancipated from conservatism, is confidently exploiting the resentments that saturate the national mood. In response, the left has skipped past the way ordinary people are feeling – alone, humiliated, and overwhelmed – and reached instead for a lifeless utilitarianism, focused on uninspiring policy solutions. What masquerades as “pragmatism” in fact represents a profound lack of confidence in engaging with the moral passions that animate democratic life.

As Peter Mair warned, decades of professionalisation have created a yawning gap between social democratic practitioners and the hostile voters they presume to manage. But British social democracy was not, in the first instance, intended to be a genteel technocratic project. At its best, it was messy, plural, and alive – an alliance of liberal, Christian, and socialist traditions, forged in workplaces, churches, pubs, and union halls. What held it together was not abstract philosophical consensus, but a dense network of institutions – trade unions, local parties, cooperatives, mutual societies, and affiliated media – that forced negotiation, compromise, and the common pursuit of tangible outcomes.

That institutional fabric did more than coordinate demands – it helped deliver on them, sometimes through the state, sometimes against it. One reason for today’s disaffection is not only ideological fatigue or spiritual malaise, but that the state itself now appears incapable of action. As Ezra Klein has argued, technocratic abstraction and vapid proceduralism have hollowed out state capacity. Where once the state was embedded in a moral and institutional ecology, it now hovers above society: discredited and ambivalent.

The dominant mode of political engagement is now what Anton Jäger calls “Hyperpolitics” – polarising and intense, yet fleeting and diffuse. In the absence of the organisational discipline that once grounded collective politics, what remains is a discursive feedback loop: pollsters, strategists, and academics now argue over ‘messaging’, ‘framing’, and ‘narrative’, in a futile effort to manipulate the sentiments of a disengaged electorate. In the process, real political agency – the capacity to organise and articulate shared interests – has been displaced. This shift also reflects a deeper cultural divide between an establishment that prefers neutrality, rules, and process, and a public who want loyalty, rootedness, and belonging – and the promise of a shared social world.

Social democracy then, must be renegotiated – through practice, through conflict, and above all through institutions and associations capable of sustaining real commitments. If today’s social democrats hope to recover any semblance of authority and ambition, they will need to rebuild the conditions that once tethered principle to practice. Without that, social democracy will remain suspended in its current role: an impotent placeholder, blamed by voters for a situation it neither built nor dares to challenge.

Jack Jeffrey is a Senior Researcher at the Fairness Foundation and is on the advisory board for the Future of the Left project at Policy Exchange. He has been a co-editor of Renewal since 2025.

James Stafford: Social democracy means trusting the people

To be a social democrat is to attempt, simultaneously, to live in the world as it is and to build the world as it might be. More radical forms of socialism aspire to this as well: that is, after all, the essence of historical materialism, and the reason why it consistently produces such compelling analyses of the ‘conjuncture’. But however attractive I’ve always found it at an intellectual level, it doesn’t quite sit right with me. Its piercing insights and satisfying polemics too often curdle into an unappealing mix of cynicism, carelessness and empty voluntarism.

I sympathise with what I take to be the social-democratic position because I am a historian and thus irredeemably empiricist. Political opportunity might present itself anywhere, at any time. Things can change, fast. Partial amelioration for some people in some places is always possible; if it is incomplete or exclusionary, it might yet build the foundations for the fuller emancipation of future generations. However bleak things seem, we must be curious, improvisational, able to perceive the new, willing to test the limits of the possible.

From this perspective, state power and electoral success are not to be sniffed at. They are precious gifts that must be ruthlessly sought and exploited. Right now, I worry that social democrats in Britain are wasting a rare opportunity. Peace and security in today’s Europe demands not just expensive new military hardware but a thorough renewal of the social contract. That renewal will be expensive: absent the kind of fiscal space available to the likes of Germany, it can only be achieved through redistribution, between regions, between generations, between classes.

A Labour government, however, is pretending instead that Whitehall chatbots, deregulation, and the cruel salami-slicing of disability benefits can somehow get us through. This is dystopian; it’s also shortsighted. Something has to give. Restoring trust in our democracy means remembering how to talk with our compatriots like responsible citizens, come what may. This, too, is what being a social democrat means.

James Stafford is an Assistant Professor in Modern European History at Columbia University. He co-edited Renewal from 2015-20.

Karl Pike: An ideology, and a wider world of practices, stories and myths

What does social democracy mean to me? I think of social democracy as an ideology and a wider world of political practices, unresolved dilemmas and stories.

As an ideology, social democracy is – as the political scientist Jenny Andersson argued – at least in part a product of responding to the changing nature of capitalism, including changes that social democratic parties and movements have themselves managed to bring about. Of course, that goes alongside ‘values’ and the political concepts within an ideology. For me, social democracy is about equality: the movement exists to push back against forces of inequality, and bring about more egalitarian outcomes. It’s still very much a matter of ‘left’ and ‘right’.

The wider world of political practices is of course connected to this. What appears ‘radical’ or not at any one point in time, or what is a risk in electoral terms, changes. That is one of the reasons why I am an advocate for as much ideological and political debate within social democratic politics as possible. A prevailing wisdom can stifle debate at times, only to then rapidly unravel. What is obvious or ‘common sense’ in politics needs to be tested. For a recent example, think of Labour and tax, where the opposition promises of no rises in the ‘big three’ taxes we all pay should have been subject to much greater scrutiny.

That leaves the stories, or myths. All movements and ideologies have them, and within social democracy they can be very powerful – reminding us of what is possible, or what political bravery looks like. These stories, though, are also simplifying – the uncertainties, doubts and questions eroded away by retelling. Politics in real-time is not like that, so a part of social democratic politics involves reminding ourselves that things do not always go to plan, and – for the most part – social democratic dilemmas are dilemmas for good reason.

Karl Pike is senior lecturer in public policy at QMUL. He co-edited Renewal from 2023-2025. 

Morgan Jones: Regrettably, I am a social democrat

Someone I know who converted to Catholicism told me earnestly that the only good reason to do that is because you can’t escape the conviction that it is true. At various points in my life it has seemed that it would be bigger or cleverer or more exciting to be of a more dynamic political persuasion, but I would be kidding myself: I know what I think is true. I believe that on a practical level social democracy makes people’s lives better and that on an intellectual level it allows for the productive synthesis of a wide range of traditions and theories of living, from liberalism to trade unionism to Marxism to secularism to feminism. It is expansive and it understands the things people need from each other and the state – dignity and freedom from material privation, liberty and obligation, fairness and privacy – to have a good and meaningfully democratic society. Done well, guided by a commitment to universalism, it allows for quiet flourishing, for parks and lidos and vaccinations and literacy and rooms of our own; done badly, it is still better than the alternatives. 

Morgan Jones is a journalist and has been a co-editor of Renewal since 2025.

Nick Garland: Social democracy is about equality and class – the task is to rediscover the urgency behind these concepts

I take the perhaps unsophisticated view that social democracy is fundamentally about two things: it is about equality, and it is about class. Other values matter, other kinds of identity demand recognition, but these are what separate social democracy from, for instance, liberalism. And it is class which remains the fundamental, unifying concern that can transcend narrow group identities. That it has become a more muddled and complex category, saddled with daft culturalist received wisdoms and rearticulated in ways that we do not necessarily fully understand, does not change that basic fact.

Social democracy has also always been, as Eunice Goes describes well, an ideology built on compromise. The compromising quality has been a necessary part of its ability to navigate social change, electoral politics and governing reality, but becomes a painful flaw when what is demanded is a politics of authenticity. My anxiety is that the ideological core of social democracy has become rather thin, while its class politics have become obfuscated and tenuous. There are understandable reasons for this – many relating to cultural, economic and sociological changes beyond politicians’ control, and others a legacy of the ideological adaptations of the 1990s, many of which were necessary responses to those changes. But today the result is that centre-left politicians find themselves straining to speak to wildly disparate audiences, and satisfying few. Publics disillusioned with a set of norms and institutional arrangements which have not delivered, and shaped by a media ecosystem which drowns out all but the most abrasive voices, are not easily stirred by a political tradition which – wary of its many vulnerabilities – frequently lapses into a reactive, tactical mindset and as a result feels defensive, institutionalist and bloodless.

Overcoming this is perhaps less a question of sweeping ideological redefinition, than of finding clarity of purpose and ideological self-confidence. It requires social democrats to regain their conviction as moral storytellers. It requires them to be clear-sighted about the existential fight in which we find ourselves, against a radical right which rejects not only economic egalitarianism but far more basic tenets of human equality. And it requires, in a political moment defined by zero-sum economics and zero-sum politics, that social democrats are absolutely clear about who they are for and (implicitly at least) who they are not for – and never miss an opportunity to reinforce that basic story. In short, it means rediscovering, and unapologetically communicating, the urgency behind class politics and egalitarian policy.

These things must be relearned because they are still right – and because a robust, social-democratic politics that pits national interest against selfish vested interests, broad-based productive wealth-creation against wealth extraction, genuine universalism against a bitter zero-sum politics, is far closer to the political centre ground than many strategists imagine or fear.

Nick Garland is a historian and researcher, and previously served as political advisor and speechwriter to Rachel Reeves. He co-edited Renewal from 2023-25.