A meeting of the Socialist International at any time in the 20th century would have been very different in nature from my happy sojourns in Florida. Their parties would have had similar names and programmes built around the same ideology, scornful of national differences and attracted to universal solutions. Hence parties of the Left have not only been wrong about what would produce equality or prosperity, they have all been wrong together. When central planning and public ownership failed to deliver, it failed everywhere, leaving them searching for the Blairite “Third Way”. And the vacuity of that has in turn left them unable to say what socialism is and at the mercy of Corbynistas who think they know.