In 2007, Tony Blair gave a speech at Blenheim Palace in which he claimed that “the real dividing line to think of in modern politics has less to do with traditional positions of right versus left, more to do today, with what I would call the modern choice, which is open versus closed”.

On the face of it, this sounds quite neat and obvious, and you can see what Blair meant.  He was saying – with some justification – that the forces of conservatism in the early twenty-first century seek to defend people from the winds of globalisation, and retreat to a national or domestic comfort zone, while the forces of progressivism embrace the opportunities of an interconnected world and the cultural and economic benefits they can bring.

But it’s also easy to see how this rather neat way of separating the world into two camps was ultimately storing up trouble for the future.  Telling people that their justifiable concerns about a rapidly changing world are due to them being closed-off, or narrow-minded, is at best patronising and at worst deeply alienating. There are reasons to worry about globalisation. Technological change means people’s jobs require a whole new set of skills or, worse, are rendered obsolete altogether. The life of a town or village will inevitably change if new people arrive there from different countries, with different cultural backgrounds and often speaking different languages. These changes are not inherently bad – in fact I would argue that in the long run they are largely positive – but you cannot just tell people that they are not allowed to be bothered by them.

Nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to immigration. New Labour welcomed, and trumpeted, Britain’s growth into an open, multicultural society. This is good and should be applauded. But, by using Blair’s “open versus closed” way of looking at the world, it did so in a way that told a lot of people who were less sure about the pace of change that they were bigoted or wrong. The New Labour rhetoric closed out the space in which people could honestly say that they were uncomfortable with what was happening. They never got to air their concerns, and so those concerns never got heard or taken seriously.

Instead of allaying people’s fears, we ignored them. Which meant that it was only a matter of time before someone like Nigel Farage came along and played upon those fears instead.

Tony Blair was right that “left versus right” is no longer a useful way of looking at the political landscape. But “open versus closed” is not particularly helpful either. And yet the fact remains that, like it or not, we do need dividing lines in politics. We need to know how one party differs from another; how each side defines itself against the other.

And so I would suggest a new way of setting out the choice: between the politics of the individual and the politics of the community.

Ever since Thatcher, the Conservatives have successfully painted themselves as the party of the individual, in ways that make this seem sensible and appealing. They want to help people help themselves; they are for the entrepreneurs, for the people who “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”. They want government to be about getting out of your way and letting you get on with your life.

The reason this all sounds so attractive is because the Tories not only picked their own side, but they also chose Labour’s terms for them. So in the Conservative narrative the opposite to “the individual” becomes “the state” – great, clunking institutional structures that want to force everyone into uninspiring mediocrity and to tell them in precise terms how they should live, right down to what they should eat and how much (or how little) they should earn.

This is a reductive, simplistic and wholly unfair representation of what social democracy is all about. But it has too often gone unchallenged and so it has stuck. Voters think that the Tories trust them to get on with things, and that Labour does not. This is wrong, and dangerous, and we have to fight back against it.

Because we are now seeing what having “the party of the individual” in power can mean for a country. It means a lowest common denominator approach to politics in which as long as you individually are OK then it doesn’t matter much about anyone else. It means policies designed to turn sections of society against one another, to determine who is “deserving” and who isn’t. It means telling people that their neighbours are a burden, and that other people’s misfortunes are their own fault.

The answer to that is not to fight back by being the party of the state. It is to fight back by being the party of the community.

I do not believe that people are fundamentally selfish, or narrow-minded, or that what they want most of all is to be left alone. I think people find their greatest happiness in their friends, their families, their neighbours and their colleagues – and that what they want most of all is for those people to be OK. They want their children to do well at school. They want their parents to be looked after in their old age. They want their friends to have good jobs, and their colleagues to be well looked after in the ones they have.

All of this is not just compatible with progressive politics; it is what lies at their very heart. Because following the Tories’ individualistic approach to its logical extreme doesn’t empower people; it alienates them. It turns them against one another and actually diffuses power. It means that a country’s whole can never be more than the sum of its parts.

But the way of dealing with that is not to pull all the way back from the level of the individual to the level of the entire nation and then try to impose a one-size-fits-all Soviet approach to making the country run. It means coming back up just one or two levels – to the family unit, to the group of friends and neighbours, to the village or town or city. Because it is at that level that people can work together, collaborate and cooperate while still retaining a sense of control and choice. It is at that level that most people think when they define themselves as being part of a community. And it is also at that level, back at the end of the nineteenth century, that the Labour party first emerged – congregations of people being brought together in urban centres for the first time and realising that they were more powerful when they acted together.

That would be my pitch for a new way of looking at the world as the Labour party struggles to find its place in it. Let the Tories be the party of the individual. We will be the party of the community – whether that is on the grandest possible scale, arguing for a truly United Kingdom to keep playing its role in a European Union of peaceful, like-minded countries; or whether it is down at the level of a family and their friends in a small town, all working together to make their lives that bit better.