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Some of you thought I was being too hard on John Prescott last week, in condemning the Government's weaknesses on the housing and urban regeneration front.  But I make no apology - even though it goes against the loyalty grain.  I feel deeply on the subject, and is a sector in which I have considerable expertise and experience.   Let me spell out the terms of the indictment.

For seven years, DoE statisticians have been warning Governments of the impending shortfall in the provision of UK housing.  We have a stock of 21m houses (or thereabouts), although not all of it is in active use - perhaps 4% is derelict, or in the wrong geographical location, or kept vacant by owners - all effectively excluded from the national stock.  It would be more cautious to say that we have just over 20m houses, available for use.

What matters, in housing policy for a democracy, is not numbers of people - but numbers of households.  The evidence is that households are getting smaller, with many more single-person households of all ages.  These are lifestyle choices, and we ignore them at our peril. This has huge implications, however, for housing policy, resulting in a need for some 4m additional homes throughout the UK - raising the housing-stock requirement, by 2015, from 20m to 24m.

But neither the outgoing Tory Government (1995/97) nor the present Labour Government has addressed the issue.

• Labour, like the Tories, has disregarded the powerful arguments favouring a change of planning presumption in favour of development, as well as the systematic revision of Green Belt policy.
• Labour, like the Tories, has pretended that the high-density redevelopment of "brownland" within existing urban areas will solve the problem (which it will not, for a myriad reasons). 
• Labour, like the Tories, has run scared of the Middle English NImby lobby. 
• Labour, like the Tories, has misunderstood and disregarded the concerns of the housebuilding industry, accusing its leaders of self-serving advocacy. 
• Labour, like the Tories, has failed to reinvigorate city local government to render it capable of solving its own problems, presiding instead over a progressive disintegration of city government throughout the UK
• And Labour, like the Tories has used the destructive and illegal practice of imposing "affordable housing" quotas upon residential planning consents, as a means of avoiding any real commitment to public housing investment.

This is - I think you will agree - a formidable Bill of Indictment.  I am prepared to make it good at any time.  Nothing would please me more than the opportunity to make a contribution to retrieving the position, for Labour.

I have a problem with that.  Not because it does not contain more than a grain of truth - of course it does, and egalitarian emotions within the Labour Party run very deep indeed.  My problem is that I find so much of the rhetoric of the "Left" wholly unconstructive - from Frank Dobson to Paul Foot, The Morning Star, Red Pepper, Tribune, and the new generations of TU leaders - my response is - "Yes - well...?"

For there is no attempt to articulate a coherent "socialist" alternative based on a different model of society.   There is no alternative model, for example, predicating the primacy of public property and the subordination of private property, private rights subordinated to public rights.  There is no claim that the trading sector would be better run by publicly-owned corporations (large or small...), dealing in all the goods of the modern economy.  There is no Grand Plan for the public ownership of all land, coupled with a scheme of non-tradable occupier-leases, such as characterised the former Soviet Union.  For it is clear that any such generic alternative would be ineffective.

So where's 'da system?  Labour is accused of "becoming Conservative", in that we operate a mixed-economy in which high priority is given to private property, private trading initiatives, and the acquisitive motives of our fellow men - yet in the absence of an alternative model, surely those assumptions are correct?  Is it not essential to deploy a conceptual model rooted in private property, however constrained by law?  Can the Left seriously propound a working alternative? Difficult judgments have to be made everyday about the precise line to be drawn between private freedom and public regulation - but surely the model is correct?  I have yet to hear an convincing alternative argued, by the Left.

Labour has become (it is also said) too "individualist", downgrading communal and collective initiatives.  Now - I agree that our over-centralised political salariat (in all Parties) is profoundly insensitive to the local communal dimensions of life, and that  a far-reaching devolution of power would be advantageous, engaging the energies and commitment of millions of ordinary citizens.  If that were done, communal motivation and communal concerns would come to play a much greater part in our lives, and that would be for the good.

But that is not to denigrate individualism or to diminish the importance of individualism in politics.  As mankind advances - in living standards and education and self-confidence - so the images of individualism acquire greater resonance, even in those societies where they have not traditionally been cultivated.  Each person's self-perception as a unique "individual" is a powerful creative and constructive force - even though we all need a little help from our friends and from the wider community, now and then.  New Labour is right to talk the language of individualism, and to articulate political aspirations in its terms. While collective initiatives remain of key political systemic importance, they must now all run the gauntlet of a more self-assured - and individualist - electorate.

Can anyone help me? Have I missed something?  Is there out there some rising new theorist of the Left whom I have missed?  Or am I right to regard "the Left" - the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Socialist Alliance - as a busted flush?  Does anyone know different?

Is there anyone brave enough to answer?