The Prime Minister's foreign policy speech at the Mansion House on 16 November did not stir the nation. Foreign policy, unless it relates to the conduct of the war in Afghanistan, is now far less interesting than a domestic struggle for power that may lead to a new Government in the first half of 2010.

Like all electorates in all democracies when there is no enemy physically in sight, bread-and-butter issues and point-scoring dominate the agenda. Lobby group after lobby group throws its hat in the ring to draw attention to some crisis in governance whose reform, it hopes, will enter into the manifestos.

Foreign Policy Under Gordon Brown

But Brown's speech is worth noting because, like all Prime Ministerial Speeches, it represents not only a set of political choices but the preferences of a bureaucratic State that will carry them into its own dialogue with a new political administration.

Foreign policy tends to show more continuity than change between administrations than do other areas of policy. The political component of the Speech is also the position of the dominant faction within New Labour and, if defeated, it may become contested when Gordon Brown is required to resign.

So what makes Brown distinctive and how will the Tories respond to his legacy if they are in Government next year?

The first point to make is that the UK under New Labour remains truly internationalist and Atlanticist in orientation. The top issues for Brown are economic recovery, climate change, nuclear non-proliferation and the Atlantic alliance against 'global terrorism'. All require international, specifically US, co-operation.

The idea of a 'shared vision' and of global institutions into which the 'world' (meaning the Western-led world) sinks its sovereignties is non-negotiable. It still remains unclear just how much the Conservative Party will drift back into a more nationalist stance if it is in power. Not as much as some think.

The Progressive Component

With an eye to his own crumbling political base, the Prime Minister spoke of 'great social movements' for 'common action'. This is the internationalism of the Left attempting to capture the soft end of the developmentalist and environmentalist movements against both radicalism and nationalism.

In this he is consistent with the general thrust of progressive thought since the ideology of the Labour Party was reformulated along post-Marxist lines in the mid-1990s. He is attempting to appeal to a post-imperial concern with 'making amends' and creating a better world.

The idealistic quasi-religious aspects of this ideology should not underestimated. All the passion that once went into Marxism has been diverted over two decades into a new global egalitarian model in which belief is as important as fact.

This is obviously so with climate change where the numbers who actually understand the science of climate change (we do not) are miniscule compared to those engaged with it as a policy issue at the very highest level. It is not a national interest but an international moral issue for the New Labour Left.

New Labour foreign policy is a hybrid of idealism and of Western, but not necessarily national, self interest where the capture of the West's military and ideological power as a progressive force in international affairs is central to the project.

The US Dimension

Brown's speech might be compared with Obama's interventions in China today where we have a similar programme adapted to American needs - economic recovery (in this case, more assertively related to trade imbalances), climate change and non-proliferation.

The differences are only that the British Prime Minister is still stuck on the war on terror groove because the UK is stuck in West Asia, while the US President had to appeal to his liberal internationalists at home with talk of human rights and Tibet in defiance of the nationalism bubbling in China's streets.

The US and UK are thus almost precisely on message with each other. The junior status of the UK in the Atlantic system might be taken as read but this raises another conundrum for analysts of a possible Tory Government - to what extent will it or can it break free of the US' own progressive agenda?

Given the fact that (as Peter Oborne's documentary noted) the Israeli lobby is shifting funds into the Tory Party, that the Tory Party is not only Atlanticist but has its own neo-conservative wing and that Cameron has already sold the pass on euro-sceptic nationalism, continuity seems likely.

Cameron is also committed to economic recovery (though his methods will be different and perhaps more amenable to the US), to climate change and to non-proliferation. His position on Afghanistan is not withdrawal (as most British people want) but better equipment!

Although the Conservatives will not have the progressive crusading zeal or rhetoric of New Labour and may be waiting out Obama for a more rightist Republican Administration, there is little sign that a vote for the Tory Party will fundamentally change the post-imperial alignment of British foreign policy.

An Excess Of Optimism

Push aside all the rhetoric and there is a policy issue unaddressed by either Party. Brown is an optimist that multilateral engagement can deal with global problems. All progressives have to be optimists. But there is another point of view unrepresented outside the nationalist right and europhile centre.

This is that the UK is taking on far too much. The programme of action proposed by the 'Establishment' (if we can call the broadly unified internationalist stance of both main parties by that name) is massive and far beyond the future ability of the British State to finance or to organise.

Multilateralism is, in this context, not an option but a necessity. The British State is brokering its historic leading position as nuclear power and voting member of the Security Council in a race against time for the day when it must inevitably drift into the second rank of powers.

Whether finally integrated into the US-led West or into the German-led EU or some preferred hybrid, by the time that China, Brazil, Russia and India find their post-recovery feet, the UK will be a province in the world system - Greece to some Rome, if only in its own estimation.

If you have a global vision (as Blair, Brown, Miliband and the Kinnocks have), the current Government represents the one shot at the future that British liberal internationalists must take and leave as a legacy to the centre-left of the wider European Union.

It is a self-consciously Gramscian pitch at ideological hegemony over a system that others will soon control in full. It is the reason for the recent fuss over Blair and Miliband's role in Europe. Although interpreted as rats leaving the sinking ship, they were only looking for a higher command.

But is this in the British national interest or is it a pitch to do universal good from ideologues that is being offered at the expense of the people who actually live within the United Kingdom?

The Nationalist Riposte & The City of London

The Conservative version of events, which may contribute to their victory, is that current general policy lines are appropriate but must be handled not from an idealistic perspective but from a pragmatic and realistic perspective. This means, of course, from the perspective of the economic dominance of the City.

This is not so different from New Labour, merely a shift of emphasis. New Labour has been committed to London as global City because it is the cash-cow for redistribution. The Tories are merely committed to it as a source of national wealth and power in its own right.

But the growing dissident perspective, fuelling libertarian, fascist and nationalist protest on the Right and liberal and even neo-Marxist protest on the Left, is that this is just not good enough.

The problem here is the very fact of globalisation and the sense that it may be producing diminishing returns and destabilising the nation. London has one third of its population born outside the UK and its economy increasingly dominates a national hinterland that has become drug-dependent on it.

It is like a hamster's treadmill - London works harder and harder to supply funds for a growing class of persons who may be unemployable, a rather meaty public sector employing 6 million people and the aspirations of a State that is expending geld in foreign policy adventures to assert its right to lead.

Meanwhile, this economic system draws in migrants who, bluntly, are degrading the old social democratic welfare system, demand (and are given) equal rights that diminish the opportunities of the weakest members of the indigenous community and build voting blocs for the new establishment.

Add to this that foreign policy (the Israel lobby is not the only one in play) is being guided by special voting blocs within urban areas, then 'ressentiment' is to be expected.

What Happens If The City Falters

But what happens when the City of London falters (as it has done recently). Current plans are predicated on the City recovering. The whole cycle then starts agaim. Yet there must be a limit to London being more innovative than clever Chinese bankers or to the physical number of migrants.

The Liberal Democrat solution is the effective transfer of sovereignty to a European Super-State that can handle the problems of faltering bits of itself. The experience of Iceland has badly shaken a lot of 'small nation' proponents and made the EU a more credible fall-back.

The nationalists of the Left and Right (not necessarily racist by any means) and possibly some Greens increasingly tend either to a fantasy of England (in particular) as some giant sovereign Singapore (which still does not deal with the problem of the City's dominance over the wider economy) or as autarky.

Autarky, not a serious proposition in its pure form given national food and energy dependency let alone the UK's intense integration into the global financial system, means less people with even less goods and services. Social cohesion could fall to post-Yugoslavian levels.

Does the UK push for an honoured position as global leader in order to secure the City's (and various innovative industries') pre-eminence, for as many economic cycles as the system will bear, or does it prepare for a City crash that has no recovery. The sensible approach would be to do a little of both.

This would suggest an international role that is centred on good trading relations with old and new centres of capital (where the Tories might be more realistic than New Labour) but build in a dynamic plan for infrastructural investment and social management to ensure national survival as conditions change.

In this last respect, New Labour seems to be offering us such a plan with its johnny-come-lately strategy of investment in nuclear power (supported by the Tories), gas reserves, transport, education and digital networks but it is doing so just as the country is facing the most serious fiscal crisis since the 1930s.

The Post-Imperial Crisis

We have to look back to the 1930s to get some context for what is happening and what is at stake. The UK's crisis then was primarily one of trade depression but it was not helped by the fact that the British Empire, in terms of costs to the taxpayer, was a net cost.

This was masked by the Second World War where national mobilisation created a temporary socialist economy. But war and empire are very expensive to run. The assets of Britain were effectively handed over to the de facto control of our US ally under a neo-colonial arrangement embedded by the 1960s.

The Suez crisis had proved that we could no longer stand alone and the Conservative Government unravelled the Empire (South Asia already having been disposed of) to the point where it had ceased to exist barring a few outposts and a troubled corner of Ireland by the 1970s.

The reconstruction of the British economy on the back of globalisation was a major achievement, based on a gamble, but it has created an air of hubris within the Establishment, epitomised by the return South of the Sahara and East of Suez of the former Prime Minister.

The current economic crisis is probably far more critical to the UK than anyone has yet realised. There is no dividend to be had from unravelling an empire or from unleashing entrepreneurial creativity. There is total dependence on a recovery in the global economy over which the British have little practical say.

The recovery will come but it is almost certainly going to be insufficient to deal with the pent-up demands for welfare in an over-populated country with a growing under-class (now represented by its own reactionary political party) facing off the liberal wealthy and urban minority groups.

The 'race against time' approach of New Labour may now be too dangerous. A colder and more realistic Tory 'national interest' view may now be required and yet the Tories are likely to take no major action where it really matters - a plan to diversify the national economy and reduce its vulnerabilities.

The next election will solve nothing in itself. We may have to wait another electoral cycle for a viable national survival policy or accept full integration into the European Project and the transfer of our voice, finally and without return, to Brussels.

New Labour is still hurting. The latest Guardian/ICM published on Monday showed the Tories remaining solid at 41% of the vote. The centre-left (such as it is) is now split between the incumbents (25%) and the Liberal Democrats (19%).

The Unlikelihood of Labour Recovery

New Labour has now been in steady though not precipitate decline since the beginning of the year while the Liberal Democrats appear to be incapable of moving very far forward under the somewhat lacklustre leadership of Nick Clegg.

What is striking is that the vote for 'others' (a range of Left, Green, nationalist and far Right parties) has maintained (after a dip) its slow rise since the June European & Local Elections.

Although not yet a serious alternative to the three main parties (except regionally), it indicates that protest is still growing at the conduct of the political class. On current trend, this vote could become greater than that of the Liberal Democrats somewhere between the end of 2009 and next late Spring.

The point is not that there is any serious challenger to any mainstream party (although we still consider UKIP to be a serious counterpart to the Scottish National Party in Southern Britain) but that the Conservative Party has managed its 'shift to the left' in a way that is now seen as credible.

This raises the issue of what that 'shift to the left' really means. Cameron's strategy was undertaken at enormous internal risk. The core Middle Britain vote of the Tories (equivalent on the Right to the solid Labour core of New Labour) is far from moderate and centrist and yet the bulk of it has stayed loyal.

But is the Tory Party Progressive?

Hardline tax cutters and privatisers may be migrating to UKIP or even hoping that Mandelson might revive a Blairite New Labour but the vigorous defence by Cameron and his team of the NHS is clearly winning or holding more votes than it is losing them.

Just as the term conservative is becoming redefined, or rather to be returning to the 'one nation' inclusive ideology of the era before Thatcher, so the term 'progressive' (a late import from the US to replace the uncomfortable word 'socialist') is up for grabs.

Actually, 'progressive' might easily be redefined as 'interfering liberal' by many Brits - as state interference without the redistributive and investment strategies of socialism - if they thought about such things very much. What Osborne and Mandelson each means by progressive is very different.

A lot of the unpopularity of the Government must be put down to its petty authoritarianism, its managerialism, its target-setting, its implicit political correctness and, amongst males and some females, the phenomenon that is Harriet Harman. This is 'progressivism' as it should be technically understood.

Exploring the Progressive Mentality

Politics Home published a poll on which party might be called most progressive earlier this month. This begged the question of what respondents thought progressive meant - we suspect many just meant 'forward-looking' but Politics Home did try to define the term.

The definition of progressive here is, regardless of party orientation, one of reform and modernisation with a dash of enterprise and enlightenment. The difficulty for New Labour is that its ideological progressives may not be very modern nor effective reformers from the perspective of most voters.

If the poll is to be believed, although most respondents did not think that any of the mainstream parties were progressive by this definition, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats could both claim 22% of the respondents - and Labour, the ostensible leading party of the Left, only 12%.

Anyone who spends any time amongst Labour activists knows full well that all but the most loyal are in despair and not just at the coming loss of power. The 25% overall vote for New Labour hides a very large minority who plan to vote for the Party only for fear of something worse.

Some cling to the 'very real achievements' (a stock phrase) of twelve years of rule but the list is scarcely impressive when set against the knowledge that massive public spending cuts are inevitable. Many of these cuts must reverse many of the gains for Labour's constituency even if Labour is returned.

The majority will now be looking back over the last dozen years and ask what exactly was progressive (except in the most restricted and ideological sense of the word) about New Labour's tenure.

Labour Progressivism

From the point of view of the activists of the 1970s who now dominate the Party great things were done - liberal interventionism overseas, the first steps towards positive discrimination, the equality and human rights agenda, extension of union rights, the greater if often covert engagement with Europe.

Unfortunately (for the bedrock of the Party), fundamental issues of permanent redistribution have only been rediscovered in the last few months and they are still seen as cultural and social issues rather than economic policy matters. Social mobility is not the same as economic security or equality.

The New Labour agenda remains the re-building of the existing economic system so that the cream can be skimmed off and redistributed as grants from the centre.

Since so much of that grant money goes on a social and cultural agenda, many workers and managers remain extremely vulnerable to the realities of the next year - the paradox of a technical recovery with huge cuts in public spending, higher taxes and increasing fear if not always actuality of unemployment.

This helps to explain why the Tories are successfully managing to sell themselves, as a 'one nation party' that will have to raise taxes, to a population that wants an economy that is more sustainable than the credit-fuelled mania and then crash of the last half of New Labour's rule.

It also gets us back to the debate between Mandelson and Osborne over who is the most 'progressive'.

Progressive Varieties

If by 'progressive', we mean a US-style liberal agenda, then the small educated minority that cares about these things will fluctuate to its taste between New Labour and the Liberal Democrats. This is the much-maligned Guardian readership.

If, however, you mean (as most British respondents will have understood the term) that a party must have an idea of where the country must go in the interests of all its people, then most people may have little faith in politicians but are increasingly prepared to give the Tories the benefit of the doubt.

What they will no longer accept is that New Labour is anything more than a failed tribal coalition that got it wrong once and is likely to get it wrong again (and do so across many policy fronts).

Meanwhile, from the Marxist wing of the Left comes the most acute criticism yet of the wider failure of the centre-left to adjust to the increased prosperity but also the increased anomie of the world of the last great economic cycle (from the 1970s to the 2000s).

David Edgar (in yet another Guardian contribution to this posting) makes a sustained attack on ideological progressives from the Left that is very hard to answer.

Since '68, a generation of middle class activists has ditched redistributive values and its hundred year alliance alliance with the poor and disadvantaged and it has adopted a strategy of seizing the State to impose its liberal values on a population that has grown resentful of its presumption.

The International Dimension

Edgar has the courage to point out that the young 'heroes' of Tehran are not quite so heroic when seen in this light. We add that the drive to spread a centralised liberal progressivism across the globe is, in essence, an export of American urban liberal values that substitutes freedom for equality at every point.

The core of the global progressive revolution started in the universities of the Atlantic system forty years ago and its activists achieved power in the West during the 1990s. This was the golden era of international progressivism and its evil twin neo-conservatism.

But the model for progressive politics is surprisingly reactionary - it is an organised seizure of the State machine by vanguard groups with an agenda of cultural change. Using mass marketing techniques, they achieved their ends but the agenda alienated the populations over which they now rule.

Given the hedonism of '68 and the use of liberal economics to finance the 'revolution', it is no accident that this generation has now foundered on economic collapse and cultural resentment - nor that resistance to the liberal capitalist system is centred on traditionalism and the populist Right.

For the 'damnes de la terre', the liberal agenda offers very little other than patronising aid, trickle-down economics, migration to the factories, weakening social provision and cultural rule by foreign educated and undemocratic or manipulative business school elites.

It is no wonder that the economically vulnerable have a trust issue with America (globally), the centre-left (within the democratic allies of America) and liberals (in the non-democratic pro-Western world). A progressive world looks less attractive the further that you travel from the US Presidential Suite.

The Core of the Matter

So let's get back to the core of the matter. The progressive agenda is now devalued currency. If it means a general commitment to the public good in the interests of all (essentially the position of Obama), then it now becomes the property of any democratic 'one nation' political movement.

From this perspective, Osborne is right and Mandelson is wrong - the Tories are now more progressive than New Labour.

But if it means the uptight socially manipulative agenda of small elites deeply frightened by democracy and its effects on their control of the levers of power, then new media technologies and the decline into political dotage of the current generation are slowly consigning it to the scrap heap of history.

From this perspective, Mandelson is right and Osborne is wrong - New Labour is still far more progressive than the modern Conservative Party.