So what exactly is a Brownite? the question runs. Surely, it is usually assumed will come the response, it is simply a Labour politician with enough sense and not enough loyalty to realise that Blair had to go and that tying your colours to his mast would simply ensure that you were incapable of swimming to freedom.

This was the case put forward by many, including Simon Jenkins {who argued quite strongly that Blairism did not exist, left alone Brownitism} and Matthew Parris {who sees Brown in as bad terms as he did Blair, who he viewed as a frothing lunatic} but I suspect that they will both be proven wrong. If you asked me “What is a Brownite?” today I would reply with only minor hesitation in a fashion which would, a week ago, have seemed impossible.

“Why, it’s David Milliband.”

As an amateur {are their professionals?} fan of political thought and a lover of the millipedes I found this piece almost unbearably blissful. It is nothing other than Milliband’s response to David Finkelstein’s article attempting to create a new conservatism. Being an awfully clever chap he has clearly done his reading and thus his grasp on what he is writing about is top notch, certainly the best I’ve encountered and what you would hope for from someone in as important a position as foreign secretary.

Although certain parts of his analysis were dubious {I am uncertain whether trade unionists would be pleased at being considered “Radical Liberals” instead of socialists but then, I’ve never asked any} the problem is that the policy he proposes is dubious. For instance he suggests that:

we must look at how direct payments, personal budgets, and individual entitlements can be extended across social care, health and other services.

Why exactly some insist on trying to treat the public sector as if it were the private is beyond me. The private sector exists already and if people were happy for it to deal with all of their life’s needs then the NHS and all other state methods of meeting basic wants would be entirely superfluous. Furthermore his “money in the hands of citizens” is one that I suspect would cause half of the doctors in the nation to fling their hands up in the air and the others collapse in despair. This is the type of idiocy that leads to the NHS propping up homeopathy and if anything we need less of it, not more.

Doctor’s orders are made by the doctor, not in the same fashion as the last ones.

Still, he is at least aware that any ideology sewn together now will need to address the two raging elephants happily tearing apart the room unmentioned: the effect of an ageing population and the economic effects of the ecologist policy proposed by every mainstream party. This is brave and will make many uncomfortable but has to be done and if there’s anyone that can pull it off then he’s the man.

And…Really…All politics aside it just overjoys me to find somebody who will write in such striking and bold terms about political philosophy. He is entirely aware of New Labour’s void identity and is addressing it directly through a suggestion that we need to move beyond the defining point of its existence: its crushing defeat of the Tories.

“The challenge for new Labour is to forge these two progressive traditions into a single narrative.”

He writes and although it’s something that I’ve struggled with immensely recently it’s actually possible to imagine him managing it. Does it make him a Brownite? Well not exactly but previously the man had seemed to ooze Blair from every pore. He still continues to be the epitome of new New Labour but what has become clear is that there is no willingness here to simply allow Brown to get tidied away electorally as almost all had imagined he would.

This is an effort to bring the two philosophies responsible for ending injustice together and merging them into one, for the benefit of Britain. Old Labour has never looked more ancient but now it seems that even New Labour has been declared overly tarnished. For the first time in quite a long while I can consider the Labour Party and have some hope.