I grew up politically in the Thatcher years. The answer for anybody on the left through the 1980s and 1990s to the miseries we marched against – Trident and Cruise, the Falklands and Gulf wars, closing the pits and unemployment – was a Labour government.
We didn't necessarily believe it would be heaven, but it would be surely better than 18 years of Conservatism.
And of course it has been better, but not by very much. Blair and Brown have marched Labour so far to the right that it has abandoned a huge chunk of those who believed in it as the alternative to the Tories.
We stood still in a space once called social democracy while Labour first embraced spin and managerialism as a tactic and organising principle. Then we watched as it used this to justify an illegal war and their own version of privatisation, PFI.
More than 200,000 party members left to be replaced by millionaire donors.
Blair and Brown have executed a historic defeat of the left. When 2 million people marched against the impending Iraq war in 2003 we thought we were on the verge of stopping it. But we failed, and with that failure came demobilisation. If 2 million couldn't stop this rotten government what could?
Of course, we told ourselves, we'd won the argument – but we knew that what really mattered was stopping the war. The government refused to listen and apart from losing the odd seat to the Liberal Democrats and George Galloway's stunning win in Bethnal Green, it has hardly suffered, has it? Tony Blair served his time out and retires with a tidy sinecure and a property portfolio.
Five years on from the war and the focus has shifted to a meltdown in global capitalism. But instead of opening up opportunities to the left we're left gaping powerlessly at the rank stupidity of a system of unregulated greed.
We have sat in front of the TV watching the news as Trident has been replaced, a national rail system dismantled, hospitals and schools built – but in hock to the private sector thanks to PFI.
And now we have bank bail-outs worth billions as government spokespersons rush to the microphones to stress that they won't be interfering in the banks' affairs.
This is the retreat from politics, not the occupation of the centre ground Labour prides itself on achieving. So we're left, grumpy old men and women, scribbling a blog on Cif, taking ourselves off to the cinema for a dose of Ken Loach or put Billy Bragg on our ipod and dream of what might have been.
And it's not just people my age that are disillusioned. There's a new generation of idealists, who thanks to war and tuition fees, see very few differences between the parties.
In every other European country there's a party to the left of Labour. In Germany, former SPD finance minister Oskar Lafontaine's Die Linke has achieved a nationwide electoral breakthrough.
In Holland the Socialist party is a significant force. In Portugal the Left Bloc has MPs and councillors. In France the left is fractious yet survives. In Italy Rifondazione has lost all its MPs but remains a powerful presence in local politics.
We used to blame not having proportional representation for the lack of such a party here – yet we have it now for European and London Assembly elections, and for a while at least in Scotland the six Scottish Socialist party MSPs proved what was possible.
And locally in Birmingham, Coventry, Tower Hamlets and Newham, Lewisham and Barrow, various left-of-Labour councillors have been elected too.
There must be tens, hundreds of thousands of people pissed off with Labour, who might vote Green or Lib-Dem but most of all we want to vote Left.
The hateful BNP has benefitted from disillusion with Labour and a crisis in working-class representation, with 55 councillors and on the verge of getting MPs and MEPs elected. Surely there must be more of us to the left of Labour's rightward shift than the BNP's recently-published list of 12,000 members.
I'm fed up with reading Polly Toynbee and the other Guardian columnists writing how they hope Gordon might do this or that, when we know he won't. And I'm doubtful that Compass can achieve very much except a few column inches when there's no mechanism left to entrench any change in Labour's direction any more.
I don't want to sit on my sofa moaning about where all the ideals have gone that brought me into politics to stand down Margaret and ended up with Tony and Gordon in her place. This pair have pulled off the biggest privatisation of the lot, of our ideals.
If there's to be any kind of a progressive future its time we found a way, a conversation, a network, a culture to turn them into public property once again.
Who owns the progressive future? is the final debate in the series organised by Comment is free and Soundings journal. It will take place in London at Kings Place on December 1 at 7pm. Guardian readers can obtain tickets at a special rate of £5.75 by phoning the Kings Place box office on 0844 264 0321 and quoting "Guardian reader offer". You can also book online. For full details click here.
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