10 things the Blairites just don't get...

Ed Miliband appeared to upset the new Labour diehards with his Labour conference speech and its implicit critique of the misjudgements - to use the kindest word - of the Blair-Brown years.

Their reaction underlines just how out of kilter the Blairites are with the times - not The Times, they always stayed aligned with that.

Here is a basic guide to the top 10 things they just don't get about politics in 2011.

1 Their model is broken.

New Labour embraced the gung-ho capitalism of the 1990s and early 21st century known as neoliberalism. It crashed and burned in 2008, leaving in ruins - along with much else - the theory that you could just tax the financial services lightly to fund better public services.

No Blairite has come up with anything worthwhile to say about what went wrong, nor about what we should do next, except to ape the government austerity agenda. Nothing as much as this fixes new Labour as a phenomenon of the past.

2 The "centre ground" is not a static spot.

It was in one place in 1945, somewhere else in 1979. In 1997 the "centre ground" was closer to where Margaret Thatcher left it, although nowhere near as close as Tony Blair believed.

In 2014 it will be much further away - sceptical about markets and supportive of state intervention, more anxious about inequality than high taxation. And it will be angry - definitely not intensely relaxed about the filthy rich any more.

3 People value security and stability as much as aspiration.

Aspiration is boom-time talk, if it means an obsession with getting ever richer.

Today people hope for a steady job, decent housing and stable communities more than they want a second foreign holiday.

4 Labour's lost voters are mostly working class.

Blair and Brown saw Labour's electorate shrink by five million between 1997 and 2010. Some 80 per cent of that was under Blair, and 80 per cent was also working class.

An exclusive focus on middle-class votes, of the sort advocated by Progress, presents no plausible way back to office.

Reconnecting with the "core vote" is the only way to a Labour majority.

5 Blair is so over.

It's a good thing his name was booed at the Liverpool conference. It shows Labour won't make the mistake of the post-1990 Tories of being in thrall to a departed charismatic leader.

The man himself is now an embarrassment - rejected by the Palestinians, baptising Murdoch's offspring and obsessed with using his No 10-era contacts for self-enrichment. Time to move on.

6 Iraq is not forgotten.

It can be forgiven - by British voters anyway, Iraqis would be another matter - but only if there is a genuine apology.

Too many Blairites are still tongue-tied about their embrace of neoconservatism.

Don't underestimate the betrayal felt by many Labour and Lib Dem voters on this issue. They will move on when there is a real sense that Labour has.

No more pandering to US presidents, no more ignoring the United Nations, no more lying to the public. We're not there yet.

7 "Choice" is not always what people want above all.

Fine for an evening watching TV. They would rather rest assured that the taxes they pay mean that the nearest school offers a decent education and that the NHS will be there for them when needed, than in shopping around for the most basic public services.

And they don't trust the private sector to deliver - that's experience now, not ideology. The pragmatically inclined may care to note.

8 Business support is not essential to winning elections.

At best, the CBI, the British Bankers Association, the Institute of Directors, the Chamber of Commerce and the rest are just another self-serving special interest wanting to put more money in their members' pockets.

Economic credibility may be important, but you don't get it from being blessed by the folk whose fingerprints are all over the crash and still won't own up to it.

Harold Wilson was too smart to seek an endorsement from the Gnomes of Zurich.

9 Murdoch-loving was a big mistake.

Maybe some Blairites do get that now, several years too late. But they miss the broader point - it is crawling to the Establishment in all its forms that gets you into trouble.

New Labour prostrated itself before every institution of power that it found - the White House, the City, Murdoch, BP, the arms industry. People vote Labour to impose an agenda on those power centres, not to just write down everything they want and put it into law.

10 No, the model is really broken.

Every political assumption engraved on Blair's heart has been falsified by the events of the last few years. New Labour equals war and slump for millions of voters.

Any Plan B Miliband can come up with has to be an improvement, not to mention a good deal more popular.