Security versus change Which message should Labour be favouring?

Fifteen years ago this month, the global financial system was in turmoil. Banks were on the point of collapse and were saved only by a mixture of state ownership, injections of capital and frenetic efforts by central banks to pump cheap money into the system.

- Larry Elliott

Gordon Brown, Britain's prime minister at the time, won praise for his leadership in preventing what was already destined to be a severe worldwide recession from turning into something much worse. Even so, it was a close-run thing.

There has been no meaningful recovery in Britain since 2008. Instead, it has been a period of weak growth and flatlining living standards, with a growing sense of insecurity and a widening of the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Since the crisis, voters have moved to the left on economic issues, with polls showing strong support for the nationalisation of public utilities and for wealth taxes. The upshot of 15 years of stagnation has been an ebbing of support for capitalism itself.

But here's the paradox. The public may be willing to embrace more leftwing ideas in principle but it has been reluctant to vote for them in elections. Jeremy Corbyn's manifesto contained things - free broadband and higher taxes on the better off - that were designed to appeal to an electorate fed up with the system. Yet he went down to a thumping defeat. People might have been looking for change in 2019 but they lacked faith in Labour's ability to achieve it.