IF I had to state the reasons I signed up to the Labour Party Young Socialists 30 years ago this year, the words ‘moral outrage’ would make for a pretty good two-word summary. The feeling has never entirely left me, and on my reckoning, Labour today could do with more of this commodity rather than less.

Harold Wilson famously declared that the party was a crusade or it was nothing, and let’s just say that in the Blair years, it wasn’t exactly a crusade. Detestation at Britain’s obvious class-based inequalities – once a given on the Labour left, and at least a theoretical postulate for the Labour right – gave way to being intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.

Loyal Brownite Douglas Alexander, writing in the Guardian this morning, at least grudgingly concedes that ‘moral outrage is a laudable response to manifest unfairness’, which I suppose is progress of sorts. However, he warns, it is not an adequate electoral strategy.

Whoever said it was? I’m not sure who he is trying to finger with that remark. This is curiously softball polemic, mysteriously directed to ‘those on the centre left’ who unfortunately remain nameless.  But I am not aware of anyone on the centre left, or even on the hard left, calling for the next manifesto to be confined to ill-defined angry platitudes.

If Alexander is contending that Labour needs a persuasive platform capable of winning a plurality of the electorate, then the article would be devoid of worthwhile content. But from the tone of the piece, it is immediately clear that he is warning against any re-emergence of democratic socialist politics.  

All the relevant codewords are inserted in the text, from ‘the lessons of the 1980s’ to a dig at those nostalgics – again unnamed – who ‘believe that the poll tax riots and civil unrest brought down the last Tory government’. This presumably translates into a swipe aimed at a handful of union leaders and Labour backbenchers who are talking in these terms, and the audience that may be tempted to listen to them.

In place of strife, Alexander commends ‘pursuing a tough and sustained course to show we can be trusted with the nation’s finances’. Or, in plain English, a readiness to stress that Labour will make cuts, too.

How deep? Well, immediately before the last election, Alistair Darling stressed his readiness to undertake public spending reductions ‘tougher and deeper’ than those seen in the 1980s. Needless to say, this ‘back to the Thatcherite future’ call was not widely regarded as inspirational, and such a scheme will not be seen as any more appealing, however many times it is repackaged.

It is not clear that widespread austerity will work, even in its own terms. The reduction in economic growth such policies generate may even make reducing the deficit harder, as is already becoming apparent.

Instead of tacitly buying in to the coalition’s small state ideological fervour, Labour should build mass support for an alternative that would put jobs, services and tax justice ahead of the needs of the City. And yes, a little bit of moral outrage would certainly help.