"And what is going on is that the SPD has lost the trust of working class German voters, is overwhelmingly a party of the public sector, social science graduates and ethnic minorities and won barely more than a quarter of the vote. It has moved its concerns from those of the internal governance of the political economy to a political and legal orientation that requires the passing of laws, external regulation and redistribution. It has not seriously defended the internal virtues of its economic system, preferring to stress external factors such a stimulus and taxation. Justice and rights rather than democracy and the good have come to define the position. I am strongly suggesting the party has become liberal rather than socialist and that is the fundamental problem."

“Miliband has acted strategically in leading the changes required in the three areas over which he has control: party organisation, the policy review, and his own leadership. In party terms, there is a far stronger emphasis on leadership development, and a greater role for organisers in strengthening and brokering the relationships necessary to re-establish Labour as a vital political force in people's daily lives. This is a neglected tradition, but the old bones are beginning to walk again. And it is not just an effective ground game: organising aligns campaigning with a better political position.”

“This conference has a very weird atmosphere – it’s a different atmosphere. It’s an atmosphere of a superannuated student union. They’ve just stayed in the student union through a lifetime. Until we have the maturity and generosity to have a genuine understanding of New Labour our growth will be stunted. The present criminalisation and demonisation of Blair doesn’t help us get to that place.”

“The institutional settlement of post-war West Germany has endured because it generated value. They retained pre-modern artisan organisations and turned them into the foundation of their contemporary economic success. They entangled and constrained capital in a myriad form of national, sectoral and localised arrangements and they emerge from the crash, virtually alone, with a productive economy and a functioning democracy, with greater equality than us and more meaningful work.”

“We've got to reinterrogate our relationship with the EU on the movement of labour. The EU has gone from being a sort of pig farm subsidised bloc to the free movement of labour and capital. Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first.”

“Post-war Labour ideology in Britain has reached the end of the road. We tried the state , we tried the market , then we tried them both together and Britain is still not generating value in anything other than financial services and high end university teaching and research. Paradoxically, both sectors are protected by the two most ancient, and most democratic self-governing institutions left in the country. Cambridge University on the one side and the City of London Corporation on the other. It is time for our socialist tradition to rediscover the social.”

“The list of characteristics of the good life suggested by Lord Skidelsky include neither work nor politics and that indicates that there is a problem with understanding power. Part of a good life is not to be dominated by the rich and the powerful and that can only be done through asserting the necessity of recognising labour as a value so that the people who do it are treated humanely and that involves the other thing that defines human beings, they can get together and change things through the power of association. Politics is part of the good life too although I can tell you it doesn’t always feel that way.”