That rather provocative question was the title of a debate I attended last week, in honour of the New Statesman’s centenary.  It culminated – shock, horror – in a London University lecture hall packed full of New Statesman readers concluding that, on balance, the Left really did carry the day (or, rather, all 36,542.2 of them).

What I found particularly interesting though, and what ultimately informed my brave decision to abstain, was the extent to which everyone was speaking at crossed purposes.  Helen Lewis gave a compelling run-through of the Left’s great social victories: women getting the vote, the creation of the NHS, homosexuality being legalised, rights enshrined in law for those from minority backgrounds.  Tim Montgomerie replied with an equally compelling account of how no one could really argue that Communism as an economic system had triumphed by the year 2000; in almost every corner of the world, free market capitalism was firmly established as the way in which civilised countries conducted their business.

And the question I was burning to ask, should any of the roving microphones ever have roved their way over to me, was this: could any of the panellists give me a convincing example of anything that the Right had won socially, or that the Left had won economically over the course of the century? I’m not sure they could (though kudos to Simon Heffer for gamely trying to co-opt Margaret Thatcher, arguing that she was left wing economically).

To me, the twentieth century was a 1-1 draw.  Or, if you prefer, a triumph for Liberalism: we were socially more liberal as a nation, and indeed a world, in 2000 than we were in 1900; and national and global trade had been liberalised beyond recognition in the same period.  I can’t go as far as Philip Collins did and say that this is wholly a good thing – 7 years after the end of the century, in spectacular style, Lehman Brothers and the rest showed us why a complete liberalisation of the market was perhaps not such a good idea.

But I do think that this ‘score draw’ way of looking at the debate is the best way to answer the question.  And I think the majority of people were content with that state of affairs. I’d wager that most people, in Britain at least, as the century drew to a close would say that they liked a state of affairs where broadly speaking if they worked hard they were rewarded with a salary that could be spent on a wide range of goods, and were simultaneously safe in the knowledge that they were less likely to be discriminated against for their gender, race, religion or (dis)ability than their grandparents.

Most people would have accepted that as the status quo, which goes to show that “victory” in this sense – and to venture into the arch-Blairite territory of triangulation – is about claiming the centre ground, to such an extent that your approach begins to be seen as the norm, and just “how things are”.  In this respect, we can see that social ‘norms’ were much further left at the end of the century, just as economic ‘norms’ were significantly further right.

But this is not an inevitable state of affairs, and nor is the direction in which things moved over the twentieth century.  It’s more just a snapshot of where things happened to be when we ticked over from 31/12/99 to 01/01/01.  Like a global game of ‘pass the parcel’, it’s more about who was holding what when the music stopped.

And already, I’d argue, we can see the potential for things to move in the other direction.  The crash of 2007/08 and the subsequent depression have shown that entirely unfettered capitalism might, just possibly, have one or two flaws.  And I don’t agree with Tony Blair that this “has not brought about a decisive shift to the left“.  I think there is real scope for a re-evaluation of capitalism along more social democratic lines, and I think that Ed Miliband is making some headway in doing so.

On the other hand, certain social issues – most notably immigration and welfare – are seeing the general public turn sharply to the right.  I do not agree with Iain Duncan Smith, but it’s hard to argue that he hasn’t done a powerful job of harnessing (and increasing) that rightward movement.  You could even begin to draw a parallel with the banks: decades of increasing liberalisation (be it capital, freedom of movement or social security) have perhaps gone as far as people are willing to allow, and the pendulum is beginning to swing back: to the left economically, to the right socially.

That is where I see the big challenge for the Left as being in the early years of this century: how do we make advances into the Right’s territory economically, seizing the post-2008 mood, while holding on to the victories achieved over the last 100 years (where the post-2008 mood is turning away from us)?  To what extent do we try to occupy the centre ground, and to what extent do we try to move it?  By the time we get to 2100, we will be able to claim victory both economically and socially?

Can we go from a 1-1 twentieth century into a 2-0 twenty-first?