That possibility – outside the fringe meetings organised by the usual suspects, of course - strikes me as fairly unlikely. The whole event is so carefully stage managed these days that anybody suspected of harbouring latent socialist sympathies will be kept well away from the lectern.

The truth is that the Labour Party – after 14 long years of over-compensating for its Clause Four past by constantly stressing its born-again believer ‘pro-business’ credentials - has simply forgotten the requisite verbal flourishes.

Such is the extent of this linguistic self-denying ordnance that it cannot even debate the events of the last ten days in the meaningful grown-up English that characterises serious economic thinking.

Read the comment pages in the Financial Times; contributors there openly use words such as ‘the capitalist system’, ‘the ruling class’, ‘nationalisation’ or ‘neoliberalism’ if that is the most direct way of saying what they want to say.

Sometimes the authors are attempting to justify the free market, sometimes proposing steps to strengthen it. Occasionally, they even acknowledge that, yes, capitalism does have certain downsides. But at all times they are unafraid to call it how they see it.

Tellingly, no mainstream Labour politician would use such frank language in a conference speech, for fear of being branded a retro-Trot or worse. And we wouldn’t want the folks watching at home on telly to get the wrong end of the stick, right?

Because the ruling party cannot even bring themselves to think in such analytical categories, it thereby effectively rules out discussion the problems facing the financial markets in the terms that would be deployed in an intelligent pub argument.

Hopefully, City minister Kitty Ussher was joking when she parodied one famous yuppie soundbite with the comment: ‘Greed is bad, I think, maybe, in some ways.’ But whether she was joshing or not, that just about sums up the level of the debate.

Over the weekend, prime minister Gordon Brown even ventured mild criticism of ‘irresponsible’ bonus culture. Spin doctors are letting it be known that legislation is not likely, although the Financial Services Authority may tamper with the regulations.

This very morning, chancellor Alistair Darling has promised to avoid ‘kneejerk’ actions. And, for kneejerk, read ‘anything that promises to be effective’.

Facilitating the Lloyds TSB takeover of HBOS and imposing temporary restrictions on short-selling financial stocks are both reasonable interim measures in as far as they go.

But there can be no adequate policy agenda that does not start with clear definitions of what the problems we face are, and what should be done about them.

The tragedy is that – at a time when a democratic socialist critique of the last three decades could win considerable popularity - the British left does not have anyone capable of articulating it.