IT COMES to something when the most interesting parts of the Labour Leadership race revolve around those who are not standing.

I’m not sure what exactly Chuka Umunna’s “jetrosexual” lifestyle is, but it makes him sound far more interesting than his politics.

At the other end of the spectrum, Dan Jarvis’s withdrawal from the race looked both dignified and unassuming: the putting of family needs before personal ambition is a rare event in political life.

In between, there looms the “spectre” of Len McClusky — another non-candidate. Trade union Unite’s general secretary is dressed up by the right-wing press as the malign, manipulative presence standing between Labour and a return to Blairite electability.

So “Are you the trade union candidate?” is already being thrown at candidates as an accusation, not a question. Few have had the sense to reply: “I should bloody well hope so.”

But the shortcomings of the leadership race run far deeper than identity or roots. Labour’s tragedy — and the trade unions are knee-deep in this — is to be found in the absence of political vision.

The arena of “post-election defeat” recriminations is already being filled by snake-oil salesmen and women. Wannabe leaders fill the airwaves with claims that it was Miliband’s failure to connect with “aspirational Britain” that caused Labour’s downfall. This is just horse poo — politics for the simple-minded. It isn’t aspiration that Labour’s missing, it’s inspiration.

Most of today’s candidates are products of New Labour’s “politics of the individual,” a politics that took us into the mess we are now in. Under the guise of “empowering the individual” and “opportunity Britain,” New Labour transferred more rights to corporations than to individuals.

Cartels now dominate British markets, from rail, to food, to energy, and all demand huge public subsidies. The country is littered with private finance initiatives for public and NHS building projects. They are the legacy of an obsession with “off-balance sheet” accounting: offering investment without taxation. Only belatedly has the taxpayer discovered the full (extortionate) costs to be paid for assets they no longer own.

No less onerous is the £375 billion debt for bailing out the banks. As Positive Money reminded us in 2014: “In 2010 the government cancelled a programme to rebuild 715 schools, because it had run out of money. But at the same time the Bank of England had created £375bn of new money through a programme called quantitative easing.

“Instead of this money being spent on something useful, it was pumped into the financial markets, benefitting the richest 5 per cent but doing almost nothing to create jobs and stable economic recovery.”

It was this willingness to sacrifice the economy in order to save the banks that Labour should most self-critically reflect upon. But do we find this among the wannabes? Barely at all. Everything focuses on an apparent disconnect with “aspirational Britain.”

Let’s begin with the kindest observations about the politics of aspiration.

First, I have never met anyone who didn’t hope their children’s lives would be better than their own, that tomorrow might be better than today. My guess is that Labour’s rout in Scotland had more to do with this than vicarious nationalism: the search for a politics beyond a choice between austerity and austerity-lite.

For years, New Labour happily chased the Tories to the right, claiming its core voters had nowhere else to go. Well, they do now. Reclaiming this core vote will require a lot more than aspirational window dressing.

Second, something profound is being missed by the aspirationalists who urge Labour to race off in electoral pursuit of “John Lewis man” or “Waitrose woman.” Both John Lewis and Waitrose are common ownership companies: they are owned mutually by the 68,000 “partners” who work for them.

Check out the Waitrose Way website. You soon discover that common ownership is just the starting point of iconic values they bring to the table.

The food Waitrose offers is GM-free. Sustainable sourcing is a benchmark of its whole product range, from food, to fish, to cooking oils. Living more lightly on the planet is central to its philosophy. And offering a fair deal to both farmers and consumers underpins its ethos. You can almost hear New Labour acolytes slamming on the brakes.

“Aspirational” New Labour never promised to make markets ethical. It threw common ownership in the bin and lived for today, not more lightly on tomorrow. New Labour became neoliberalism’s lap dancer. Whatever transnational corporations wanted, transnational corporations got, including a complete inversion of Britain’s welfare state.

As Britain faces further cuts in “unaffordable” personal welfare, the bill for corporate welfare will go on unchallenged. The government may want to get out of the EU, but it will sign the TTIP agreement first, giving corporations the right to sue British citizens for any imposition of ethical standards that might threaten short-term profit-taking.

A Waitrose Britain would reject this, but Waitrose Labour never reaches beyond the surface. New Labour hungered for “the pants of power.” It never asked whether they were ethically sourced.

This government will widen the gaps between rich and poor. Worse still, it will become submerged in crises of “weather” long before it acknowledges they are really a crisis of climate. If Labour is to stand for anything it has to be for a better politics constructed to face this crisis.

So, it may turn out to be a gift that the electorate drew a line under the Blair-Brown era. What follows has to be radically different. By all means start from a critique of the “now,” but it is a vision of the “next” that will determine Labour’s (and Britain’s) fate.

Britain is sitting at the edge of the another recession, not the beginning of a recovery. The ONS picture of British and Northern Irish trade balances shows us how shaky everything is.

Britain runs a permanent trade deficit. We consume what we no longer produce. A million new jobs may have been created, but the key question is “What do they make?” rather than “What do they pay?” No country can just shop its way out of a recession. But this is what Britain is trying to do.

Meanwhile, even “aspirational” Britain may turn out to be aspiring to different things.

Whole tranches of Yorkshire, Cumbria, Worcestershire and the Medway towns may, like Somerset, aspire to live above the flood line. Many more British families may “aspire” to holiday on unpolluted beaches in Britain rather than to jet off to Florida. Londoners aspire to have breathable air. And all round the country, households aspire to have access to safe food, sustainable soils and lower energy costs (from renewable energy sources). What they will be told is: “Fat chance.”

Britain is not only saddled with an economy hidebound by rigged markets that are intensely short-term. It also has a Westminster politics that has become sclerotic. This is far more than a “regionalist” critique.

I come from the north, not the past. What Britain needs is a radical devolution that delivers ethically accountable markets, not a resurrection of local fiefdoms. In energy, it would mean breaking up the “big six” energy cartel in favour of smarter, more competitive (and integrated) localised energy markets of tomorrow.

Elsewhere in Europe there are towns and cities already doing precisely this, taking local energy grids back into social ownership. Their new markets sell energy saving as enthusiastically as (clean) energy consumption. They deliver carbon savings by obligation, but create new markets through which to deliver it. Sure, this is science, but it’s not rocket science.

It’s just that Britain doesn’t get it.

Britain’s institutions of governance, its Whitehall corridors stacked high with corporate secondees and its political leaders who queue up to pay homage to them are all part of the problem. The answer to the mess we are in is “none of the above.”

Times of crisis are supposed to throw up leaders with a bigger vision than the moment they live in. Lord knows, we need to find one now.

• Alan Simpson was Labour MP for Nottingham South between 1992 and 2010.