As in Germany and France, Italian voters were denied a clear alternative to the rightwing agenda of Silvio Berlusconi

The more pressing trend is the paralysis that seems to be gripping continental Europe's three biggest nations. In Germany, France and Italy the political class (spurred on by business) has become convinced that a specific remedy is urgently required to treat their ailing economies. They must, the elites long ago concluded, submit themselves to radical restructuring, deregulating their industries, liberalising their labour markets. There are a variety of names for the medicine - Thatcherism, Blairism, neoliberalism, the Anglo-Saxon model - but the masters in Paris, Berlin and Rome are in no doubt that it must be administered if these three arthritic European lions are not to be mauled to death in the globalised jungle by India and China.

This may be annoying to read, but it is FUNDAMENTALLY TRUE. But what is true is NOT that the countries need Thatcherism, but that the elites spurred by business are universally convinced that they need it.

That's the situation we find ourselves in, and there's no reason for us to hide that fact - we are a minority amongst / against the elites / the chattering classes in arguing that the remedy is not "radical restructuring" (lay offs), "deregulating" (less oversight over business) and "liberalising labor markets" (paying workers less and breaking unions).

The good news is: facts are on our side - and so is the population.

The trouble is, citizens of the European troika refuse to submit to the treatment. Either they fail to endorse it at the polls, as they did in Germany by converting Angela Merkel's initial lead into the narrowest of victories over Gerhard Schröder. Or they take to the streets, as they just have in France, forcing Dominique de Villepin to drop his relatively modest plan to make France's under-26s more sackable and therefore more attractive to employers. Either way, they will not allow their leaders to impose the Thatcherite reforms the leaders say are essential.

The case for layoffs, less pay, less rights, less protection has not been made as such (and one wonders why...)

But, confusingly, these voters do not rally to a clear left alternative either - partly because of the failure of progressives around the world to articulate one. They know what they're against, but they are yet to gather round a programme they're for. The result is a stagnant stalemate, repeatedly reflected at the ballot box.

Again, while it is annoying to read this, it brings to our attentiion an important point: the case for progressive policies is not heard. And I am careful to say "not heard" and not "not made". Indeed, that distinction is crucial, and it is what we need to work on: not to make our case, but to get it across.

Yet the electorate was not presented with a clear course of action. On the one hand, the neoliberal case was not argued directly. The arch free-marketeer Berlusconi promised an increase in the state pension and greater social protection, not less. Meanwhile, it was the social democrat Prodi who called for a cut in the amount employers pay towards the social security of their workers. Each was trying to wear the clothes of the other. That's partly because both men had large coalitions to hold together. But it was also because the Italian right did not dare offer an unvarnished Thatcherite programme, fearing the electorate would reject it. So the parties hedged their bets - and the voters did, too.

But if the right failed to offer a clear programme, so did the left. It did not have a distinct vision of its own, one that might counter the neoliberal ideology of privatisations and liberalisations. That's hardly Italy's fault: the left worldwide, its confidence wrecked since 1989, lacks a coherent view of political economy, a proposed system it might put to voters. "Too often the alternative to neoliberalism is just conservatism, like those French students who want to keep the world the way it was," says Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform.

That paragraph makes it obvious why our task is difficult. what matters is not actual content of policies, but the labels that are attached to them. (And the obvious complicity of journalists and columnists in propagating these labels and focusing an them to the detriment of facts)

• anybody that talks about "liberalisation", the "Lisbon agenda" (in Europe) and is vaguely pro-American, is promoted to the lofty title of "freemarketeer" and "liberaliser", and thus a good guy. Calling Berlusconi a liberaliser is so absurd on its face that it's hard not to laugh, but there it is;

• any feeble economic results under the watch of a "liberaliser" are blamed on the fact that he had to tone down its policies in the face of an hostile, "conservative" electorate. Thus the - systematic - economic failures of the right in power are blamed on not enough "reform", and not on the misguided policies they push, their wasteful use of the budget and their utter corruption;

• politicians of the left are either demonised as dinosaurs ("communists", "conservatives", "reactionaries" - all come from the hard left these days) and thus ignored, or lionised as "third way reformers", trying to insert reasonable sense into their otherwise misguided leftist policies. They are the only ones given airtime, and thus grows the idea that everybody on the right and the left agrees that "reforms" are necessary; policies coming from the left are thus either described as "reform", or not even debated as they come from crazies;

• presented with a choice of diluted liberalism cloaked in populism or the most rightist form of social democracy dressed up as the "sane left" - two essentially identical policy proposals (well, not exactly, in one case you get power hungry crooks, in the other case, mostly competent opportunists), it's no wonder that the electorate gets disgusted at the lack of alternatives and has trouble distinguishing them when the alternatives don't exist - or votes for the noisiest alternatives when they do (Jean-Marie Le Pen and the unreconstructed Trotskysts in France).

What we need is not so much for the left to have a programme, because in most countries, it actually does, but for that programme to be heard and promoted.

So the question is - how do you pierce that wall of common wisdom shared by politicians and pundits alike - that conviction that everybody has that "reforms" are needed?

I am not sure, but I have two suggestions:

• First, we have to repeat everywhere we can, in all forms, that the economy fares better under governments of the left: it grows more, it is less unequal, it creates more jobs - and the stock market even does better. we have very strong statistics for the USA (Clinton vs Bushes), France (Jospin vs right wing Prime Ministers under Chirac), Italy (Prodi vs Berlusconi). Let's push the relevant statistics forward, and the corresponding policies;

• Second, we have to underline the fact that the supposed superior growth of the "Anglo" countries comes from very traditional tools of the left: State spending - with the twist that the money is borrowed instead of coming from taxes: i.e. our kids pay instead of today's rich;

• Third, we have to repeat as much as we can the translation of the terms used:

  "radical restructuring" = lay offs
  "deregulating"=less oversight over business
  "liberalising labor markets" = paying workers less and breaking unions

  (there was a longer translation in the Stockholm network thread, could it be posted as a comment here again?)

• Fourth, we must speak explicitly against the conventional wisdom and affirm forcefully that all these things that are being demonised: unions, minimum wages, workers' rights, taxation, regulation of business are precisely what made our economies prosperous, and that that the health of an economy cannot be measured by the profits of its corporations - and that the health of a country cannot be measured on economic criteria only.

• Fifth, and most important, we HAVE to hold journalists accountable when they thoughtlessly repeat the common wisdom interpretation of events or policies. They ARE COMPLICIT.

How's that for a programme?

And here's a slogan: "There is an alternative to Thatcherism. Something that actually works. For all of us. The left. Building on its history and track record"