Why have social democratic parties been in abject retreat at the very time when inequality has been so remorselessly widening, real wages for the middle and working class declining and financial capitalism plagued by instability?

Of course frustration with social democratic parties is nothing new. The 1906 British general election sent 29 Labour MPs to the House of Commons. Yet, just two years after this pioneering political development, the leader of London’s dockers Ben Tillett issued a pamphlet entitled Is the Parliamentary Party a Failure?

A healthy impatience for progress has certainly been one of the Labour membership’s key characteristics from the very start, guarding against complacency and what Ernest Bevin called ‘poverty of ambition’. But it is acutely relevant to European social democracy today where centre-left parties seem to have lost faith in their own philosophy, leaving voters wondering what they stand for and whose side they are on.

In Britain former Labour Deputy Leader and Cabinet Minister Roy Hattersley put his finger on the deep-seated nature of the problem with his succinct indictment of Labour’s 2010 general election defeat: ‘The Party not only failed to set out a clear and coherent idea of what it proposed to do. It was not even sure about the purpose of its existence.’

Although in 2015 Labour won 740,000 more votes, its 30 per cent share of the votes cast fell well short of the 43 per cent in its 1997 landslide. Over four million votes had gone missing, the great majority under Tony Blair by 2005.

Underlying the decline of Europe’s social democratic parties has been a striking loss of self-confidence in projecting a serious alternative to the right and its neoliberal ideology. Unable or unwilling to adopt a distinct anti-austerity stance, they have been settling for second best by offering a pale imitation of right-wing economic policies, and suffering a serious loss of support with voters looking elsewhere for hope of a better future.

In Britain this meant Labour fighting the 2015 election on a vague call for ‘sensible cuts’ in public spending. That, it was claimed, would restore Labour’s lost credibility on economic policy by making the Party appear more ‘responsible’ in the eyes of an electorate that supposedly attributed big budget deficits to alleged Labour ‘overspending’ before the 2008 global financial crisis.