DAVID MILIBAND is right. He said many voters avoided Labour because “They didn’t want what was being offered” by the party.

They did not want Tristram Hunt or Chuka Umunna or Rachel Reeves or Caroline Flint. They didn’t want the New Labour types who were among Labour’s leading lights in the election campaign.

Nor did they want Ed Miliband himself or Andy Burnham — the New Labour people who wanted to shift slightly to the left.

They most emphatically did not want Ed Balls , the New Labour” shadow chancellor who argued Labour must stick with cuts and austerity. But somehow David Miliband’s observation that too few voters backed Labour is interpreted in the press mostly to mean they rejected only the little leftward shuffle of Ed and Andy, while Chuka, Tristram, Rachel and co are somehow very wanted.

In fact Labour as a whole failed to inspire.

There is a good reason to believe that Miliband’s caution, not his boldness, stopped Labour’s advances. Hemmed in by the majority of the shadow cabinet, who did not like Ed’s attempt to move away from the true New Labour path, Miliband could only make very limited gestures to the left.

By contrast, Nicola Sturgeon was able to steal all but one of Labour’s Scottish seats by taking a stand against austerity, while Miliband tried to replace actual calls for change with absurd symbols, like his big, slightly racist “Ed Stone” monument.

David Miliband also said that Ed Miliband had not had enough of the “principles of aspiration” in Labour’s campaign.
I think he is right about that too.

The dictionary says aspiration is a “hope or ambition of achieving something.” It is “desire, hope, longing, yearning, hankering.”

But because Ed Miliband said that Labour had to stick with austerity, he could only offer limited “aspiration.” He was very short on the “hope-y change-y thing” which helped President Obama win elections in the face of a tough right-wing party and an economic crisis. Obama wasn’t as good at actually delivering hope and change, but did win elections on it.

Many of the small “left-wing” gestures made by Miliband were defensive — fewer cuts and less privatisation for the NHS — rather than positive suggestions offering a “hope of achieving something.”

So I agree with David Miliband that Labour’s lack of “aspiration” was a problem. But again, the press and much of Labour’s shadow cabinet seem to think “aspiration” is only about being nicer to the better-off. They seem to think only middle-class people have “aspiration” — presumably working-class people just have perspiration.

Labour’s leadership talks like aspiration can only be met individually, by giving the better-off more money. The “aspiration” of working people and a joint hope to create a better society is somehow not there. The idea that we can “aspire” to collective solutions has disappeared from Labour’s leadership.

But elections are not won just by the left just having the right slogans. We have seen whole new political parties of the left rise up — but only on the back of social movements. Podemos in Spain have a new way of articulating popular hope.

But they didn’t just grow on slogans, they grew out of mass occupations of the squares of Spanish cities. Syriza in Greece has also managed a tricky process of uniting the left — but they grew out of years of strikes and demonstrations, as well as careful negotiation and clever talk.

The SNP took almost all of Labour’s Scottish seats by taking the kind of strong stands that Ed was too weak to take — on austerity, on Trident. But they did not become a mass party just by saying the right things. They became a mass party thanks to a massive movement for independence, with rallies and meetings in every town. The SNP translated a social movement into electoral results.

The Labour Party itself grew like this. When previously unorganised groups like the dockers in the 1900s or the car workers in the ’30s and ’40s were brought together in unions, these social movements then built electoral victories for Labour. The continuing post-war growth of active trade unionism, with its shop stewards and mass meetings in the company car park, underwrote Labour’s presence in Parliament.

So if any party of the left wants to win, it needs to see voters being drawn into social movements rather than just drawn to the right slogans.

Labour broke into the House of Commons as the representative of the workers’ interests in Parliament. But it was only able to do so because the workers were representing their own interests outside Parliament.

Some people don’t agree. According to a Daily Mail headline, “Tony Blairite heavyweights savage Ed Miliband” over the election loss. The “Tony Blairite heavyweights” are ex-ministers who argue Ed went way too far left, abandoning those “aspirational” middle classes.

To say nothing of their own “aspirations.” Former Labour Health Secretary Alan Milburn — who now makes a living running NHS privatisation firms — joined the “keep right” critics. So did Peter Mandelson. His lobbying firm Global Counsel works for corporations and multimillionaires — particularly those from the former Soviet Union.

Disgraced former Labour home secretary Jacqui Smith also joined the “heavyweights,” with an article in Progress magazine arguing that only Blair has the answer.

Smith was kicked out by the voters after her scandalous claims for housing expenses.

But this February she took a new job. She is now chair of Westbourne Communications, a lobbying firm run by by Lord James Bethell, a leading Tory and former Cameron aide.

According to Westbourne, Smith “offers crisis communications counsel and strategic advice to clients about their relationships with government and the Labour Party.”

Those clients for Jacqui Smith’s new employer include Centrica, the firm behind British Gas; Construction firm Bam Nuttall, who are embroiled in the worker blacklisting scandal; frackers Cuadrilla and Ersa, the trade body of useless “workfare” firms like A4e.

• Follow Solomon Hughes on Twitter @Sol_Hughes_writer.