In the Dog and Duck, outside school gates, across garden fences, the talk is of little else. Britain nervously anticipates the publication next week of the new ‘National Plan’. Queues will form outside Waterstones, as the public eagerly awaits Labour’s proposals to take Britain from recession to recovery, from doldrums to the high seas. Not since the publication of Lord Denning’s report into the Profumo scandal, which sold 4,000 copies in the first hour, has a government document been so much in demand.

I will leave it to psephologists to find historical parallels for Labour’s poll performance on June 4th, but with our share of the vote down to 15% in the European elections, it’s clear that we’ll need to look far back into the annals of history. With a year at most to turn things around a plan to re-connect with voters and win again is needed.

At a time when most people are feeling the pinch, pressure is mounting on Alex Salmond to justify spending on the Council of Economic Advisers.

It was at the very end of the 19th century that one of Yorkshire’s greatest social reformers, Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, carried out his survey, looking at the living conditions of 45,000 York residents. Results of the survey, designed to test household income against a poverty line, were published in his 1901 book, ‘Poverty, A Study of Town Life’, and showed that almost 10% of York’s population were living in primary poverty. The main cause of this poverty was that although people were in work, ‘wages (were) insufficient to maintain a moderate family in a state of physical efficiency’. Rowntree exposed the concept of the ‘idle poor’ to be a myth – the poor were working, but inadequate wages meant poverty.

Our government rightly led the way at the G20 Summit in London in calling for reform of our beleaguered financial framework. We now need to work closely with our European colleagues in turning these ambitions into something more concrete, before the worst of the financial crisis is forgotten.

For the last two years I have lived, studied, and worked in the United States. I arrived in the country two years ago cynical about the state of its politics. Although my columns for Progress got some of the minor calls correct – like predicting that the extended Democratic primary would help whoever faced John McCain, or that Sarah Palin was the dark horse candidate for Republican VP - I was wrong to think that Hillary Clinton could actually win the nomination after Super Tuesday or that John McCain would give Obama a run for his money in the general election. I got those predictions wrong because I profoundly misunderstood a critical aspect of America’s collective DNA: its ability to reinvent itself, realise its errors, and move on.

Gibraltar has its Barbary apes, and the Tower of London its ravens. For Labour, we always had Tom Watson’s opposition to electoral reform. The globe needs its fixed points, otherwise we’d all get confused and fall off.

The French post-structuralist philosopher, Michel Foucault, had a fascination with Iran. When a million people descended onto the streets in 1979 to oust the venal and corrupt Shah, he declared it to be the ultimate proof of his theory of revolutions – one of the very few historical examples of a popular overthrow that was not simply an elite coup d’etat.

I found myself in a BBC television studio last week where I was asked to complete the sentence ‘the big issue of the next general election will be...’ My answer (having been told to make it a soundbite) was three little words ‘the economy stupid’. They were asking about the next general election, whenever it may be. Voting for our European representatives had not yet begun. Had they asked what the issue of the European election was, I'd have answered that the thing about the 2009 European election was the fact that it had nothing to do with Europe.

“We’re done for.” Western Europe that is – or at least in the opinion of my fiancée, after spending an hour or so talking with our neighbour Vijay.