It was a glorious September morning. But I was in a ruminative mood, walking towards Westminster’s Church House for the unveiling of another damning account of Britain’s economy. It was the launch of the interim report from the Institute of Public Policy’s (IPPR) economic commission. Time for Change is one of the best I’ve read and yet I was wondering how its unanswerable assessment of our economy and the need for systemic reform has so little purchase on the national debate.

I made similar arguments in my book The State We’re In 20 years ago and have attended many such launches ever since, often graced by bishops and some daring business executives prepared to break cover and speak out. It’s the same story of underinvestment; a woeful track record on R&D; overemphasis on high, short-term profits; an incredibly poor record on productivity and stagnating real wages. On almost every international comparison, Britain fares badly, with a desperately weak export sector overfocused on financial services and a few manufacturing industries.

Many aspects – the structure of our companies, the priorities of finance, the skills of our workforce, the creaking infrastructure, the weakness of the tax base – need to be addressed because the failures are interlinked. We have an economic muddle rather than an economic model, declares the IPPR commission. Yet for all the self-evident truth in the report, my fear is that little will change. After all, both Churchill and Keynes said nearly a century ago that finance was too proud and industry too humble – the heart of the IPPR’s diagnosis. We’re still saying it today.

The IPPR commissioners gamely argue that the problems are becoming so acute that the years ahead – as in the 1930s and 70s – will see a paradigm shift. I am not so sure. For all the failures, I doubt they will trigger popular demand for system change unless we can create political and cultural forces much better at articulating what needs to be done and then doing it. There hasn’t been a reframing of the way capitalist institutions work since the 1930s and 40s. The change in the 1970s was a shift to the right, still firmly in control of the national narrative, and now running the rightwing coup that is Brexit.

There are multiple reasons for the right’s hegemony. Part is cultural. Jacob Rees-Mogg is a twerp, his views are rooted in prejudice rather than evidence and he is no ally of the mass of the British. But too many English instinctively genuflect to that lazy “gentlemanly” superiority. So when he and his ilk dismiss the case for system change as “ socialist engineering” and instead lay the blame on welfare, European regulations (without being able to name any) and the moral bankruptcy of liberals who indulge everything from the work-shy to soft criminal sentences, they get an undeserved hearing.

But, surely, the great banks, investment houses and mighty companies can’t be that flawed? Our extravagantly paid managerial class can’t be so incompetent? Instead, we are tempted by the easy option of understanding failure and decline on this scale in terms of individual moral failings for which we are being punished. The benefit cheats in the flats opposite or the migrants allowed to crowd in a safe house, snapping up jobs on zero-hour contracts. Then there’s soft liberalism with its pernicious indulgent views.

Powerful rightwing newspapers that foreground the same stories about welfare cheats and immigration while relentlessly attacking liberal institutions – the BBC, the NHS, the EU – reinforce these reflex reactions. They would never endorse or champion the IPPR’s powerful analysis. And the written word, even from a tawdry biased media, retains disproportionate cultural force.

Too few figures at the top of our society speak out either in defence of Enlightenment values or at the evident crisis before their eyes. They fear being struck off the lists for non-executive directorships and public appointments by making criticisms that could help the dread forces of Labourism. Not to mention lost invitations to the ritziest of parties.

In this respect, Britain has echoes of other declining nations over the centuries – Venice in the 16th century, Spain in the 18th, Austria-Hungary and France in the 19th. All knew full well that their political, economic and social systems had become dysfunctional, but reform was impossible. Too many at the top had stakes in the old order, reinforced, as in today’s Britain, by being at the apex of the social pyramid.

This makes Labour’s political challenge all the more difficult. It is the outsider party, so that even when it holds office it feels like an unwelcome and short-term occupant. System change needs allies from within prepared to provide the ammunition to support telling criticism and make common cause in reform.

But Labour’s leadership often finds itself in a bind. Either it so craves legitimacy, like Blair and Brown, that it does not want to embrace criticism of the status quo, so it threatens and does nothing. Or it so disregards forces it openly despises – see Corbyn and McDonnell – that it can recruit few or no business and financial allies. But the task of system change requires coaxing insider allies to burn their conservative boats and make common cause for the national good. You need Blair’s persuasiveness and Corbyn’s conviction – an impossible combination? Otherwise, the left mouths intent, but with little evidence or substance to back its proposals, which is disabling it even if it wins office.

Perhaps Brexit is changing these dynamics. The right is managing a cockup of such epic proportions that some in the Tory elite are beginning to dissociate themselves from a brand that is becoming as toxic and emblematic of failure as the Romanovs and Hapsburgs. Tory newspapers are so biased that their influence is slipping.

I know of one British ex-ambassador who flaunts his Labour party membership as a badge of pride at every prestigious event he attends; he was once seen as a loopy eccentric but now others are now wondering if he is not right. Most businesses and their lobby organisations will find it hard to fault what the IPPR argues, and a wide cross-section of people have signed up as commissioners. Labour’s shift on Brexit has won it many admirers and its manifesto signalled a welcome awareness of both the direction and systemic nature of necessary change.

These are but straws in the wind, but they foretell how Brexit may be the trigger to breaking the Conservative hegemony and perhaps even reshaping the balance of power between finance and industry. If so maybe my worries are misplaced and any successor walking into Dean’s Yard in 20 years’ time will be attending the launch of a report discussing a country on the economic rise – and leading the EU. Here’s hoping.