Greg Rosen: People Power could be the way ahead for Labour

It is striking that for much of the London commentariat, Ed Balls's fondness for Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband's fondness or otherwise for his brother, David Miliband's fondness for curvaceous yellow tropical fruit, and how Andy Burnham has grown such luxuriant eyelashes have assumed greater importance than the question of what each as leader might actually do.

Perhaps this reflects the tone of the soap-opera narrative of the Blair-Brown years emanating from the coverage of the Mandelson and Blair memoirs that has provided the backdrop to the campaign. Like the bestselling novels published recently by Peter Mandelson's great friend Robert Harris, relating the life of the great Roman orator Cicero, politics is portrayed as the rivalry of personality - in this case some sort of uber-Freudian blood feud of the Mili-band of brothers. It has not been helped by the tendency of candidates to assert the primacy of their personality in determining their potential electability. In fact, as successful leaders from Clement Attlee through to Margaret Thatcher and John Major demonstrated, having an abrasive personality, or indeed a "personality deficit" has never been a bar to high office.

In 1997, Tony Blair, like Harold Wilson in 1964 and 1966, successfully deployed a "modernisation" narrative. That resonates when an Opposition is campaigning against a government that has been in place for 13 (or in Blair's case 18) years. But if Labour's next leader wants to win the 2015 election, he will need to do more, and to move beyond the mantra of being "progressive" and "modern". Rhetorically, the coalition will seek to lay claim to the same ground.

The real issue for Labour's next leader will be what he will do to answer the question that voters will pose at the 2015 general election: "How will you invest public money more effectively than the last Labour government?" Tony Blair's mantra that "what matters is what works" suffered in practice from an absence of a coherent understanding within government of what actually did work. Though Blair emphasised the importance of evidence-based policymaking, and investment in social research and evaluation of government projects sky-rocketed, much research was simply inconclusive. Notoriously, the single most common conclusion relating to Home Office crime reduction projects was that the project in question had been wrongly implemented.

So if the "man in Whitehall" does not necessarily know best, who does? David Cameron's Big "do-it-yourself" Society has the obvious flaw of not necessarily providing for those who cannot do it themselves.But Labour's strategy at the 2010 election, positing a Tory "do-it-yourself-society" against Labour's "enabling state", resonated only so long as most voters saw the state as a responsive and accountable servant of the people. The election result suggests that they do not.

Fortunately, for Labour's next leader there is an alternative model available, one that was explored by all four of Labour's leadership candidates who served in government. This is the "People Power" agenda advanced by Labour's sister party, the Co-operative Party, with whom Labour has enjoyed an electoral pact since 1927. The Co-operative Party, currently with 28 MPs elected in alliance with Labour, has historically been that part of the Labour alliance that did not start from the premise that whatever the question, the answer is likely to be "the state". Indeed, back in the era of Clement Attlee the Co-operative Party was modestly suggesting that far from nationalisation being the embodiment of "people power", a mutual structure, with direct consumer control, would be a more effective and accountable model.

While serving in the last government, Ed Miliband quietly slipped more than 20 Co-operative Party policy proposals in Labour's manifesto. During the leadership campaign he has pledged to put "mutualism and co-operative ideas at the centre of Labour's plans for public services. From the NHS to schools, our public servants and public services users should have a greater opportunity to get involved in running and even owning their services and co-operatives are one of the best ways of achieving this."

Not to be outdone, during August his brother David Miliband publicly embraced the Co-operative Party's plan to transform the BBC into a democratically accountable mutual under which licence-fee payers would "elect representatives to a Member's Council that would elect a majority of members of the BBC Trust" to "give licence-fee payers a way to a democratic voice in the priorities of their broadcaster." He has also backed the Co-operative Party's plan for "British Waterways to be turned into a mutually owned co-operative" and for "community shares in football clubs, pubs, renewable energy and shops"

Ed Balls, meanwhile, is himself one of the 28 Co-operative Party MPs and has promoted co-operative schools as an alternative to the Conservative Party's Free Schools plan. There are more than 70 already in England. Balls has also advocated "making housing associations democratic" and turning them into mutuals. Andy Burnham, too, talks regularly about using co-operative supporters trusts as the mechanism to give football back to the fans.

These ideas would be a step towards implementing Labour's Clause IV - as re-scribed by Tony Blair - to give "power to the many and not the few". Blair himself was never that interested in co-operative ideas. Simple privatisation seemed more "modern" than mutuals, with their roots in 19th-century co-operative idealism.And he failed to make the state, or the regulators of privately operated utilities, more publicly accountable. The result was organisations like Network Rail and the BBC Trust: effectively accountable to no-one but themselves.

Depending on how radical Labour's next leader chooses to be, mutualism could be a far more profound and meaningful "big idea" than the Tory Big Society slogan to which it will be compared. Promoting co-operative rather than council-run housing, and giving "people power" control of Network Rail to voters by converting it into a mutual, could bring a much-needed shake-up to the stale private versus public, statist versus individualist paradigm that Cameron has been keen to promote. And might provide the key to Labour winning the next election.