I WAS in Westminster last week for only the second time since the election, avoiding the commute between our capitals being one of the major compensations for losing it.

Meandering through the colonnades and corridors to make my lunch rendezvous I had a stop and chat with three former colleagues from the Labour Party.

All three are decent people I’ve worked with on cross-party campaigns. None were Corbyn supporters, and they would all describe themselves, I’m sure, as loyal party members. And all were thoroughly fed up and depressed at the situation they have found themselves in.

They, like us, cannot understand how a Labour government so quickly lost whatever way it thought it had. Admittedly, being friendly with the likes of me probably means these three former comrades are atypical Labour MPs, but nonetheless there seems a deep disquiet with this new government. Perhaps the despair is compounded by an apparent impotence when it comes to doing anything about it.

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The majority is massive, enough to withstand another round of suspensions of anyone kicking against the traces. Meanwhile, the Tories continue to self-destruct, having got rid of the affable Cleverly from their leadership race.

So, it looks like nothing is going to change anytime soon. Perhaps in time what’s left of the left in England may repurpose themselves, but for now all they can do is suck it up.

We are witnessing the excision of social democratic influence on public policy by this new new Labour government. And the process has more urgency and purpose that it did with the old new Labour government. At its heart is an assault of the notion of universalism.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” wrote Karl Marx. In truth he nicked the first part from the bible, where the idea of living and survival being a shared human endeavour underpinned Christian morality.

How to put that dictum into practice, and specifically whether it can be achieved by the regulation of capitalism as opposed to its abolition, has divided the left for generations, but the objective has been widely shared.

The idea that we all pay for stuff society needs and each of us get the services we require underpinned the growth of the post-war welfare state, its apotheosis being the NHS. Apart form doing the right thing, there are a range of practical reasons why this approach works.

For starters it is a much more efficient use of money and talent to organise services within a single system, allowing an economy of scale not possible if we all fend for ourselves. It also means that more, maybe even all, members of society can access services, whereas large swathes are left behind when you get only what you can afford.

This matters for social stability, with mental illness, violence and crime all diminished by the erosion of inequality.

Crucially, allowing everyone access to what they need means everyone has a stake in the system, which builds political and philosophical support for being asked to pay for it.

It is important that rich people can use libraries and travel on buses for free as well as the poor. If only some people received these social benefits, the case for collectively paying for them is undermined.

The alternative to universal provision of services is to ration them so that people who are deemed to have the means to do without them are excluded. Under this system, social provision becomes not a system of social solidarity, but a safety net to catch the very poorest who are unable to help themselves.

Those in favour of means testing argue that scarce resources should be targeted at those most in need of them rather than being given to those who do not. But it is entirely possible to recoup universal payments from wealthy people through the tax system – which is exactly what happens in the case of child benefit.

Applying a means test allows government to set the level above which support will be withdrawn and as we have seen with the winter fuel payment for pensioners, this is an arbitrary rather than a scientific judgement.

(Image: Peter Byrne/PA)

Unless people are living below the basic subsistence level at which pension credit is paid, then their support is withdrawn. And while it is true that rich pensioners will have no great difficulty with this, there are millions of households with a fixed income between the pension credit level and the average income where real hardship is the result.

Shifting the proportion of our wealth which is deployed in the public realm rather than reserved for private consumption is a pretty fundamental yardstick by which we can measure just how civil our society is.

That objective now seems to have been abandoned by all major players in the UK political firmament. It is time we brought that ideal home and made it a central tenet of our ambition for self-government.