The list of characteristics of the good life suggested by Lord Skidelsky include neither work nor politics and that indicates that there is a problem… - Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman

I was involved with organising migrant worker nannies, domestic workers, in New York State with the IAF. We flew them to a hotel, got them together, and got them to talk to each other about what their issues were. What was incredible was that out of those 300 nannies all of them were prepared to pay a not insubstantial part of their wages to join a union that could articulate their concerns. They were getting sexual harassment, exploitation. It only grew out of them meeting each other, they had to have that initial investment to get them together. They came from all over the world but what they found when they got together was they had the same issues. If people knew you could join a union, get on, and protect each other it would be transformative – we’ve got to find a way, to put it bluntly, of supporting good work. There needs to be a complete transformation of the language and agenda of unions.

What did I think about Brown? I’ve said before, I don’t like his kind of politics. I didn’t really meet him properly but I identify him with state, state-ism, with simultaneously high morals and low cynicism. I never identified with that kind of politics. The last gasps of this idea that through the state you can transform society but how that then automatically leads to a dependence on finance to fund it. I don’t think Gordon Brown redistributed power to people.

On the face of it, these look like bad times for Labour and for Ed Miliband's leadership. There seems to be no strategy, no narrative and little energy. Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem stuck in defending Labour's record in all the wrong ways: we didn't spend too much money, we'll cut less fast and less far, but we can't tell you how.