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 ener… - Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman

Unfortunately, the comments were misconstrued. I was saying that we needed to speak to the supporters of the EDL, not, as some people made out, that we should speak to the EDL itself. The idea that we should speak to upset, angry and dispossessed people, to try build a better life together, must be addressed and historically the Labour movement has been the vehicle to do this. It is a broad-based approach. Where there are mass outpourings of discontent, you have two choices, either you demonise them or you break them.

Among those who voted Brexit, there is still support for Parliament and its traditional sovereignty, for the monarchy, for the NHS, and for the Union. As the Copeland by-election showed, they prefer to vote Conservative rather than Ukip, and as the Stoke result indicates, many will grudgingly vote Labour rather than Ukip. What they wish to see is a democratic politics that represents their interests. If this is populism then it is of a muted English variety that wishes to see the renewal of national institutions and a recognition that family, place and work—the things that matter to them—matter to their rulers.

Labour was different to other European Social Democratic Parties in that it was never aggressively secular and was not divided by confessional fissures. Its founding act, the Dock Strike of 1889 was brokered by the Salvation Army and Cardinal Manning. It was never a revolutionary party that became more peaceable but was, from the start, committed to extending democracy within the inherited constitution. It also had a base of support among the working class that secured British democracy from Fascism and Communism and that was because of its paradoxical nature, as conservative as it was radical, as patriotic as it was nationalist. The greatest failure of New Labour is that it led rather than resisted the definition of the European Union as a neo-liberal project and did not develop a constructive alternative to the status quo. It seemed incapable of distinguishing between internationalism and globalisation.