I’ve been thinking all week about the need to wriggle out of the media-party pact. Your talk of broader policies and capturing the public’s imagination links to this. Eventually, unless we are just going to stand here as hostages to fortune and wait for the media to like us, we must move beyond the idea that a party communicates its policy in the form of “news”, because as soon as we concede that much, (1) we are reliant on outside agencies to interpret us and (2) we are limited to putting across a little chunk of policy at a time, and for it to play with the electorate it has to be instantly comprehensible in the context of an accepted status quo. And that means no broad policy direction, and no say over how we come across (and of course makes us slaves to personality politics).

So basically the “answer” is dumping the media, and what one does instead, I have no idea, because it sounds utterly impossible. Whatever replaces it has to be innovative in the proper sense of the word (i.e. “something new”, not “online”), and as self-perpetuating as Facebook (something about people’s eagerness to navel-gaze, complete personality quizzes and read horoscopes may be a key of sorts here). It has to encourage the electorate to respond in ways other than those they are used to, because at the moment we are limited to being stopped in the street and asked whether or not we “like” David Cameron or Gordon Brown more (what does that even mean?)

Actually, I haven’t got any ideas, I’m just fleshing out your question. Well, I did say “ish”. Moreover, even supposing some new paradigm did evolve, it would still be difficult to push a liberal, progressive tax policy for as long as it is an accepted truism that conquering the natural human instinct for greed is unhealthy. Unlike say, conquering the natural human instinct for shagging people you shouldn’t, or murdering people who irritate you.

But not to worry. Sooner or later the flu pandemic will arrive, half of us will die, the pressures that create the aggregation of wealth problem will be removed, it will be recognised that an asset is a resource to use as and when you need it and not a little piece of your soul, and the assumed centrality of greed to all financial policy will be one of many things overturned by stark, mass comprehension of mortality and the ephemeral nature of ownership. Ho hum, all things pass.