After a day or two of reading the almost incoherent rage of the Daily Mail, I concluded that Brown must have got it right. More importantly, I believe that the left’s confidence is coming back.

Political confidence is about feeling able to stretch your ideas to their limits. The Thatcherites had that confidence in the 1980s: they felt able to propose market solutions to almost anything. I once tried to satirise this, suggesting competitive police forces. If your house was burgled, you would ring the constables most likely to apprehend the culprits - and they would get a fair cut of the value of any recovered goods. Somebody wrote pointing out that a nephew of Milton Friedman (the free-market guru) had seriously proposed exactly that. So great was the success of the privatisers and free-marketeers that, more than a decade after Thatcher fell, Labour ministers are still clinging to daft ideas fit for the Adam Smith Institute: the public-private partnership for the London Underground, for example, or city academies in deprived areas. I hate to use the word, but the Thatcherites created a new paradigm (OED: “a pattern followed; a mode of viewing the world”).

In 1976, I wrote for the New Statesman an article proposing that it should be unlawful to advertise jobs in terms of general educational qualifications.

In other words, it was no more acceptable to say “only those with two A-levels need apply” as to say “only whites need apply”. Discrimination against the uncertificated was as bad as discrimination against blacks, women, homosexuals or disabled people, I wrote. What mattered was that people had the skills to do the job in question; general qualifications were as irrelevant as gender or skin colour.

People naturally disagreed with me. But nobody suggested I was mad or that my proposal was beyond serious debate. Indeed, I was able to support my ideas by reference to the reports of provincial commissions in Australia and Canada. What I wrote fitted the spirit of the age; it was within the paradigm.

Now fast-forward to an article in last week’s TES by David Miliband, a Labour MP. You cannot get more New Labour than Miliband. He was head of Tony Blair’s Downing Street Policy Unit until 2001 in which capacity he would frequently wag his finger at my reckless old Labourism.

Yet last week David, if I understood him correctly, argued that, in every deprived-area school, a quota of the top-performing pupils, regardless of their actual A-level grades, should receive university places. He was able, just as I was more than 25 years ago, to quote overseas state governments (American and Australian) in support. This is not very far from my own proposal that every secondary school or tertiary institution in the country should be allocated places, in proportion to their numbers of pupils, at our dozen or so elite universities.

The effects of such a scheme boggle the mind. There would no longer be an incentive for ambitious middle-class parents to send their children to exclusive private schools; on the contrary, they would clamour to get into the deprived inner-city state schools in the belief that the competition for university places would be less intense. We might at last get the social mixing in schools, and perhaps even in housing, to which socialists have long aspired.

Yes, I know there are numerous objections. And I know that David Miliband may not want to go as far as I would. But what matters is that both of us have the renewed confidence to stretch our minds - to be, if you like, daft in a left-wing rather than a right-wing kind of way. The paradigm (dread word!) has changed.

Peter Wilby is editor of the New Statesman