Gillian Duffy baked Simon Danczuk a cheese and onion pie the other night. Apparently it was "very nice". They are "good friends", the Labour MP for Rochdale and the lady who, during the last election campaign, was flattered by Gordon Brown in public, then branded a "bigoted woman" in what he thought was private. Which just goes to show, eh? Brown may not have "connected" with Duffy. But others in Labour have no such problem. Her support for the party has survived the encounter. Victory!

It was Danczuk who told Duffy that the Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, was visiting Rochdale earlier this week, and suggested that she might like to take the opportunity to give him a piece of her mind. Danczuk arranged a car to take her to the offices of Holroyd Precision, the local business that was expecting Clegg at 9am, and three Labour activists accompanied her on the trip. The wheeze worked like a dream.

Clegg recognised Duffy right away, greeting her with a "Hello, Gillian", before subjecting himself to the inevitable barrage of basic and critical questions. Duffy had heard all Clegg's answers before, and told him so. But that didn't matter. The object of the exercise was publicity, not fresh political debate, and it worked. Publicity has been duly drummed up.

Publicity for what, though? Duffy first gained media attention because her conversation with Brown, and its aftermath, graphically exposed something important. Labour, not just Brown, had become used to condemning any wariness about the impact of fast-changing global demographics on local communities (Duffy offered the example of "flocking" eastern Europeans) as merely the result of a personal weakness – prejudice. Yet if the party is any further forward now with formulating policy, or even a "narrative", that addresses such worries in a less dismissive way, then it is keeping it oddly quiet.

Labour doesn't have any such policies, of course, or even any such narrative. Explaining that international labour-market flexibility has to be maintained for the benefit of business, not its employees, and everyone must therefore learn to like it, would hardly indicate that Labour is getting back to its roots. Certainly, the Conservative approach – complaining about immigration while backing to the hilt the economic policies that accelerate it – is hypocritical and divisive in the extreme. But the fact that neither party dares to be honest on this matter says a lot about the empty gesture of contemporary politics.

This Duffy palaver is very much part of that empty-gesture politics. Duffy stands, supposedly, for ordinary wisdom and speak-your-mind decency. But her totemic prominence, as the only ordinary woman who has ever even met politicians, has the whiff of the amusing stunt about it, and is perhaps a sign of how little, not how much, ordinary wisdom and speak-your-mind decency is valued in our politics.

Danczuk's release of Duffy's private kindness of pie-baking into the public domain does not make him a cynical person. What politician could resist the temptation to offer up pie-baking, that international signal of sound, modest, home-loving nurture, to the media? The grandmother making a pie for her friend the MP: it suggests solid, simple, community values that politicians often hark on about, even though they have little ability actually to promote them.

Yet this too is a stunt, a stunt that takes in politicians, it appears, much more than it takes in the electorate. Both main parties suffer from a longing to cloak themselves in storybook nostalgia. The Conservatives nod to Phillip Blond's Red Toryism, Labour to Maurice Glasman's Blue Labour. David Cameron talks about the Big Society, and Ed Miliband about the Good Society. In fact, neither of them talk too much about these things, because there is not very much to say about them. The Conservatives, no less than Labour, rely on offering financial blandishment from the state in order to kid themselves that they can orchestrate such things as a rekindled enthusiasm for marriage, or a desire to succeed in education. But neither party is able, for obvious reasons, to formulate the set of blandishments that will inspire us all to tick the box that promises to make us, the electorate, "better people". The entire concept is patronising, silly and absurd.

In their not-so-different ways, these community-emphasising, small-c conservative strands of thought each conjure a vision of village Britain, with a yearning for self-reliant communities, complete in themselves, nurturing and neighbourly, sober, law-abiding, respectable and respectful. The idealised inhabitants of these imaginary communities are like the "little man" of early 20th century Conservatism, who featured in Sidney Strube's cartoons in the Daily Express.

Yet it's plain that neither party is at all keen on truly promoting "localism", complete with butcher, baker and candlestick-maker, because that would mean challenging the might of monopoly capitalism. And everyone knows, after the banking crisis, that monopoly capitalism goes pretty much unchallenged, even when it is on its knees. The Tory little man has been replaced by Labour's little woman. But the idea – of flattering every voter for his or her willingness to be a modest cog in someone else's big wheel – remains the same, and still manages to be both romantic and insulting.

There's something fatuous in Labour's eagerness to adopt Duffy as a mascot, and literally wheel her out to score political points. It's as if her support in itself washes away the errors that they made when in power, and says something substantial about the changes the party must somehow have made in order to regain Duffy's trust – changes that Labour politicians cannot articulate because they have not yet thought of them. Labour seems to think it has all the time in the world to fill up Miliband's blank sheet of paper, with room for light-relief knockabout larks along the way. That in itself says worrying things about the length of time they think – or even hope – that the cutting Coalition is going to last.