For months before the election, Lord Falconer, the shadow lord chancellor, was hard at work behind the scenes. He toiled away at drafting bills for Labour’s first 100 days in power – ready in time for tomorrow’s Queen’s speech. Labour, he told me, would have hit the ground running with an array of measures – an agenda Ed Miliband said would “change the way the country is run and who it’s run for”.

Here’s an exclusive glimpse of the bills that could have graced the goatskin parchment the Queen will slip out of the silk purse. First, a housing bill would have paved the way for 200,000 new homes a year, with planning reform and powers to stop developers sitting on unused land-banks. Plans to regulate the private rented sector included three-year leases, rents only rising with inflation.

The bedroom tax would have been abolished within a week by statutory instrument. A bill would have reformed the energy market, temporarily preventing price rises while the six companies were broken up, no longer acting as both retailer and wholesaler – a signal to all sectors where consumers feel trapped by cabals.

A labour market reform bill would have ended zero-hours contracts and abolished prohibitive fees for employment tribunals. A constitutional convention would have brought devolution for Scotland and Wales going beyond the Smith commission, accommodating English votes for English laws without making Scottish representatives second-class MPs. House of Lords reform would have been prepared, along with votes at 16. We would have been spared the EU referendum.

A bill would have repealed the marketising elements of the Health and Social Care Act, the notorious section 75 that puts every service up for private tender. The NHS would have been restored as preferred provider, with the health secretary again legally responsible for the service. Shifting the NHS to local councils’ health and wellbeing boards would have spread the devolution now happening in Manchester to all councils, integrating health and social care. A bill devolving power to city regions and counties would have gone further than George Osborne proposes. New free schools would have been stopped, instead of the 500 more Cameron promises. On railways, a bill would have created a public sector competitor free to bid for all franchises – and the badger cull would have ended.

One bill Falconer drew up with particular relish: over-mighty media ownership would be curtailed. A bill would have restored something like the rules before Margaret Thatcher abolished limits on the press and broadcasting one owner could control, when she granted Rupert Murdoch unprecedented market dominance. Newspapers would have been pushed to fall in with Leveson. Since all titles but the Guardian and Mirror backed David Cameron, Labour had little to lose by restoring more media plurality. Yet it fired new levels of ferocity. Will anyone dare again?

The first budget would have raised the top tax rate back to 50p, brought in a mansion tax and abolished non-dom status for those long resident, while raising the minimum wage. It would have sealed Labour’s eye-wateringly tough pledge to abolish the deficit in one parliament (something Osborne probably won’t). Ed Balls would have made good his promise of no rise in income tax, VAT or national insurance – though they collect £3 out of every £4 in revenue. That budget would have bound Labour to cap the social security bill, painfully hard as tax credits rise due to low pay and housing benefit soars due to sky-rocketing rent. There was nothing flaky in Labour’s fiscal policy: it was too austere for many Keynesians.

Looking back, Falconer sees those first bills as talismanic of what Miliband’s Labour could have been. He is one of the few close Blair colleagues who worked flat out to get the party elected, while so many of yesterday’s men sniped from the sidelines offering unfriendly advice, instead of shooting at the enemy.

As Labour strives to recover from a near-death experience, the leadership candidates’ instinct is to shed what they fought the election on. Anything else, some say, is “an ostrich” over the enormity of Labour’s defeat. In truth, many of these were popular policies, well tested with the public. Surely none of the candidates inching for an illusory “centre ground” can make a tougher tax-and-spend, deficit-cutting, welfare-capping offer? Perhaps Labour did talk too much of underdogs on zero hours and not enough about the squeezed middle. But this is no time to stop talking about galloping inequality, just when the governor of the bank of England, the OECD and the World Economic Forum warn it presents the most serious economic risk.

With Labour and its leader as unpopular as they are, different policies would have changed little. Even a political magician would have struggled against two mighty forces: first, Labour, like every other government ejected after the crash, could never escape blame for both the meltdown and the resulting deficit. The Tories nailed Labour into that coffin. Second came pre-election economic figures beyond Osborne’s wildest hopes: few governments fall when jobs, wages and growth rise while inflation plummets, let alone with a bonus of tumbling petrol prices.

As the Queen adjusts her glasses tomorrow to read out Cameron’s programme, pause to consider how much better – and more popular – most of Falconer’s bills would have been. Do most people really want to spend the next two years obsessing over Europe and the Human Rights Act? Selling off social housing instead of building it? Clamping down on strikes and cutting public spending and benefits in ways kept hidden before the election?

Michael Gove as lord chancellor will hand up the speech and not Charlie Falconer, because Labour was roundly rejected. But it would be a mistake for leadership contenders to think victory depends on renouncing Labour’s manifesto. Liz Kendall ditches the 50p top tax rate and wants a tougher family benefit cap. Yvette Cooper goes for cutting corporation tax, while Mary Creagh and Andy Burnham ditch the mansion tax as “the politics of envy”. Each wants an emblem to show they understand “aspiration” – but all those only back the aspirations of the rich. The winner should be whoever paints the most powerful image of the future, not the one who tramples hardest on Miliband’s Edstone.