Watch David Miliband talking to Daniel Finkelstein

All of a sudden David Miliband is everywhere, and the moment is full of hazards for him. First, let us designate him, for the purposes of this argument, as representing the future of Labour in government – what with his full head of ungreyed hair and his Optrexed look of shiny-eyed enthusiasm.

Present danger No 1 is the snare and diversion of the argument that he should consider standing against Gordon Brown for the leadership of the party. I can understand why some media folk, bored perhaps with the Prince Charles quality of Gordon’s eternal wait, now want a William solution, with Mr Miliband acting the leaping frog. Maybe a Charles Clarke candidacy can test the waters for David, they say, and show levels of potential support, after which DM could make a proper, exciting contest of it. If all went well he could even win, and if he lost he would become a power to be reckoned with . . .

Mr Miliband realises, I think, that it doesn’t work like that. The Times poll last week shows that Mr Brown is perfectly electable in a general election, even before he has sat a week in No 10. In addition, the internal party arithmetic works almost inexorably in favour of Mr Brown, and there is no rule whatsoever that the winner in these contests has to be magnanimous towards the loser. Don’t be fooled by what hasn’t yet happened to David Davis.

In any case, long before we got a result, various pro-Gordon knights – not requiring even a mention of turbulent priests – would have set out for Canterbury, mobile phones and lethal contact books in hand. Mr Miliband, like his ministerial colleague Douglas Alexander, is already having one of those weeks when you rediscover how tough politics can be. The last thing he needs now is to make enemies.

Present danger No 2 is that, though the opinion polls look better for Labour than the news events of the last year might have indicated, there is the possibility that the party may be frightened into a fatal conservatism. Despite Mr Miliband’s efforts in these pages yesterday, almost all the running so far in the battle of postBlair ideas has been made by those whose slogan could well be “onward to the past!”.

Key phrases in any such orientation are almost always “return to the grassroots”, “listen to the membership”, “strengthen links with the unions” and “differentiate Labour from the Tories”. The current champion of this approach is the personable and intelligent MP for Dagenham, Jon Cruddas, who is standing for the Labour deputy leadership and emphasising what might be called conservative-Labour values: blaming Tony Blair’s centrism for the hollowing out of the party, for its loss of membership and for the fall in voter participation.

A fortnight ago the 23rd Report on British Social Attitudes arrived on my desk. Among many other interesting things the report showed that there has been a long-term decline in identification by the voters with all the political parties. In 1985 46 per cent of Britons expressed a strong or fairly strong identification with a political party. By 2005, and encompassing 12 years of Conservative and eight years of Labour government, that had fallen to 35 per cent. This loss of affiliation suggests that, blips apart, we should expect a long-term fall in party memberships.

The report also looked at the public perception of differences between the parties. It showed that that the greatest distinctions were seen in the elections of 1964, 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992 (all but one being Labour defeats) and the smallest in 1970, 1997, 2001 and 2005 (all but one being Labour victories). By and large the greater the difference, the larger the Tory majority.

The report concluded that, with union membership dropping from 23 per cent to 20 per cent of the workforce between 1998 and 2005, “despite a raft of legislation intended to assist unions . . . to prosper and grow”, there was little sign of a union revival. On that basis alone this is not where Labour 2010 should pitch its marquee.

There are other reasons. In a recent article for the magazine Public Finance, the general secretary of the Unison union, Dave Prentis, asked how it came about that, with so much investment in the NHS, no one was celebrating. “Instead,” he asserted, “there is a pervasive air of crisis . . . How has this happened?” Well, Google “Dave Prentis” and “NHS” and there’s one clue. Prentis went on to outline his vision for the health service: no to targets, no to private competition, no to choice, give us more money and go away.

No, that’s unfair. He also said that there were “numerous examples of positive reform in our public services” and then gave a single example. “In Birmingham, for instance, social care workers now choose their shifts through a computerised self-rostering system. This lets them take control of their own work-life balance . . .” Great. A classic example of seeing public services as existing for those who work in them and not for those who use them. Now, with the change of leadership, argued Mr Prentis, there was an opportunity to “get the project of public service renewal back on course”, opposing the “false solutions” of the market (ie, choice) and “privatisation” (ie, competition from the private sector).

Just before Christmas the political committee of another trade union, Amicus, donated 15 grand to Jon Cruddas’s election campaign. This was declared to the Electoral Commission and appeared on its website, but as of yesterday there was nothing about the donation on the Amicus website for its members to read, nor any single mention of Mr Cruddas at all.

The third peril is implicit in yesterday’s Miliband article. Labour must, he wrote, “respond to emerging aspirations and fears”. The greatest fear it seems to me is the fear of change, and the greatest danger is pandering to that fear. The pace of social and demographic transformation can easily lead to the growth of populist movements dedicated to an almost nihilistic rejection of the real world. The new political divide may now be between a progressive embracing of globalisation and a determination to reap its benefits and deal with its problems, and a narrowing back into a crabbed, frightened island existence.

Labour – and Conservatives and Liberal Democrats for that matter – must “respond” to the aspirations, but argue with the fears. And they must all be bold, but Labour – as the party in power – must be boldest of all.

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