It was a weekend of thinking about Labour's future. On the one hand we had Owen Jones and on the other Ed Balls.

Writing in the Independent, Jones put forward an interesting nine-point plan for future Labour policy.

It's a list of practical and do-able things - introducing a statutory living wage, a 50 per cent income tax for those on over £100,000, chasing down £25 billion in tax avoidance, bringing in publicly accountable local banks, green jobs for the future, a charter for workers' rights, a universal childcare system, regulating the private rental sector, undertaking a new programme of council house-building and taking the railways and energy sectors into public ownership.

This is all good stuff and would have happily been in most postwar Labour manifestos until the arrival of new Labour.

Balls's speech at the Fabian Society's annual meeting was spun on the basis that Labour would run a budget surplus if it wins the 2015 election, with Balls pointing out that Labour will inherit a deficit of £80bn and rising national debt.

As well as this he promised he would also match Tory spending plans for 2015-16.

The problem with Balls's position is that by binding Labour to a budget surplus he therefore either has to massively increase the tax income or continue the Osborne plan of dramatically reducing public expenditure, which affects the poorest and most vulnerable in our society.

Balls made some very good points in attacking the government's misleading use of statistics on living standards and correctly identified that the rising cost of living disproportionately hits the poorest people and that many of those who are now logged statistically as "in work" are on zero-hours contracts on the minimum wage.

He also quite correctly drew attention to the Institute of Fiscal Studies' findings that household incomes will be lower in 2015 than in 2010.

The part of his speech that got the most coverage was his proposal that an incoming Labour government would reintroduce a 50p rate of tax for those earning over £150,000.

This eminently reasonable suggestion was met with a chorus of condemnation by the wealthy, the powerful and those who would have to pay slightly more in tax.

The Tories answered, with bizarre logic, that a higher rate of tax is more likely to be avoided and so we should stick with the lower rate of tax.

Two issues come to mind on the back of Jones's and Balls's comments.

New Labour in 1993 was very quick to dismantle much of the democracy in the party and hand policy-making over to the parliamentary leadership and the consensus-bound policy forums.

Conference and the national executive were denuded of much of their powers.

Therefore preparations for Labour's 2015 manifesto rely heavily on the decisions made by the leader's appointment of members of the shadow cabinet, leaving the rest of the labour movement to be spectators of their own party.

The second factor is the very clever media manipulation and presentation of the so-called economic recovery by George Osborne and David Cameron.

The ever-so-pliant popular media in Britain have joined in the debate about "welfare" and indulged in an orgy of attacks on anyone who receives any kind of social security payment.

This has developed the perception that the vast majority of income from taxation goes toward paying for unemployed people to receive benefits.

The reality is that just a small proportion of the DWP budget covers unemployment. By far the biggest expenditure is on pensions.

But our popular media never lets facts get in the way of a good deal of prejudice.

They've also been successful in claiming that the economy is doing well because unemployment is falling. There needs to be a serious health caution printed alongside these figures.

Income levels in the private-sector jobs that have been created are much lower than the former public-sector employment and many people are on short-term, insecure and perhaps even zero-hours contracts.

We are 16 months away from the 2015 general election and to mobilise Labour voters we need not accept Tory spending plans or manoeuvre ourselves into a straight-jacket of artificially limiting public expenditure when investment, particularly in housing, clean energy and improving workers' rights and childcare, is actually something that is universally popular.

It took a long time to persuade the leadership of the Labour Party to oppose the bedroom tax.

We don't have the luxury of time to get the message across regarding the crying need for an end to inequality within our society.

The unity of the rich and powerful in their condemnation of the 50p tax proposal shows just what is at stake.

There is an increasing contrast in debates in Parliament this week.

Today Parliament will be debating a very good motion by the Labour front bench, saying that Britain should step up to the plate and be prepared to accept a UN programme that provides safety and security for people fleeing the Syrian conflict.

Such UN projects are not new. After the 1973 Chilean coup there was a programme of resettlement for those fleeing Pinochet's violence, and the same has happened for a number of other conflicts.

Obviously humanitarian aid is crucial, as are the Geneva 2 peace talks, which must be accompanied by local and then a national ceasefire in Syria if there is to be any chance of long-term peace.

Many refugees in Syria, particularly the Palestinians, descend from families who have been driven from pillar to post across the region since 1948.

They are now having to up sticks yet again to move to another refugee camp in another country.

On Thursday Parliament will be debating the report stage of the Immigration Bill.

Tories love to debate immigration, particularly in the run-up to an election, and they have form on this going back 50 years to the notorious Smethwick election campaign in 1964.

The latest Immigration Bill comes on the back of regulations which do not permit family reunion unless there is an income level which is above that of many low-paid migrant workers.

The system also massively delays full settlement for those coming in on spousal visas and takes pride in denying many even the opportunity of making an asylum application on arrival and limiting access to justice through the legal aid system.

The excellent Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and others have done great work in promoting the Movement against Xenophobia and presenting detailed opposition to the Bill before the house this week.

Specific amendments include attempts to restore the right of appeal for those who've been denied the right to remain in Britain, and to allow those people subject to deportation orders to remain in the country while the appeal takes place.

Other amendments include the right of bail applications and, very specifically, removing the whole section which says that landlords have to effectively become immigration officers in deciding which tenants to rent to.

This comes on the back of revelations by the Panorama programme that many letting agencies already systematically racially profile their respective tenants.

Theresa May and David Cameron are fond of saying that they will not allow the National Health Service to become an international health service and that they will restrict patients' access to GPs and ask temporary migrants to pay a surcharge to ensure that they don't get free health care.

The public health risks associated with this are obviously enormous as infectious conditions will go undiagnosed and untreated. And the longer-term effects on the individuals concerned and the rest of society are huge.

Britain has benefited enormously from immigration over the past 60 years and in the midst of all this debate about the Immigration Bill, Osborne and Cameron have been forced to concede that the visa regime for Chinese visitors is economically counter-productive.

It's a strange irony that it was a Tory government that introduced a cap on Chinese migration and made visa applications very difficult after the British control of Hong Kong ended.

The debate about immigration should be a debate about human rights and justice, recognising that in an era of relative ease of transport and mobility, many people travel.

Five million British people live outside Britain and European migration is a legal right in all 27 member states of the EU. This debate is dominated by the racism of Ukip and its relations in the EDL and BNP, which fuels paranoia in the Tory Party.

This Immigration Bill has nothing to do with justice and human rights, but everything to do with prejudice and meanness.

Jeremy Corbyn is Labour MP for Islington North