Define the past, dictate the future. That’s what the Tories did with the financial crisis: spun it instead as a crisis of public spending, and used that story to hammer Labour and justify austerity. And that’s now what the Blairites are doing with last week’s election disaster. The problem, as they define it, was not Labour’s suicide in Scotland and the consequent anti-SNP backlash in England and Wales; not failing to defend New Labour’s spending record; not lacking any coherent alternative at all; no, Labour failed because it wasn’t Blairy enough, not rightwing enough. Sure, I knew that this co-ordinated campaign – backed by virtually the entire mainstream media – was coming, but the chutzpah, the vacuous nature of the counterblast, has been compellingly awful. That’s why a letter signed today by 10 newly elected Labour MPs is so welcome, because this mantra needs to be unpicked.

The Blairite warriors should consider Labour’s 2015 offer. Cutting taxes on small business, maintaining the lowest level of corporation tax in the G7, slashing spending every year, temporarily increasing the top rate of tax to the same level as Japan. Wasn’t exactly The Communist Manifesto Redux, was it? The gimmicky energy price freeze is produced as evidence to the contrary – but didn’t your beloved New Labour introduce what was then deemed an outrageously anti-business windfall tax on privatised utilities? Or the “anti-business”, “anti-jobs” minimum wage, with the state intervening in businesses to dictate a wage floor? On immigration and Labour’s trade union link, Ed Miliband’s leadership actually represented a shift to the right from the Blair years.

Where was this leftwing shift? And if it existed, why have people like me been so unhappy for the past five years? Maybe you felt Miliband should have repudiated Labour’s Tory-backed, pre-crisis spending levels. The irony, if so: Miliband should have been more New Labour by dumping on its economic record.

Here’s my big problem, though. I don’t know what these people even want. I’ve heard their obsessive chitter-chatter over aspiration alright, but I have no idea what they mean by it. So let me call the Blairites’ bluff. Come on, ghosts from several Christmases past, stack your policies on the table.

If we’re talking about “aspiration”, I’ll kick things off. Scrap stamp duty and council tax, and replace both with a land value tax. Abolish unpaid internships so that the daughter of a Glaswegian dinnerlady and the son of a Mancunian corner shop owner have a shot at a job in the professions. Introduce a scholarship scheme – call it the National Aspiration Scheme, if you like – to support working-class people, people of colour and other unrepresented people aspiring to be journalists, work in fashion, law, politics, whatever. Prove by “aspiration” that you don’t mean cutting taxes on the uber-rich, and cough up.

And then three words beloved by the uber-Blairites: public sector reform. Three words you often hear in thinktank seminars, to be sure, but not so much on the doorstep. This means Labour should be backing absurd schemes like free schools, presumably. Get a Blairite to stare you in the eyes, keep a straight face, and tell you that if only Labour had backed free schools and handed swaths of the NHS to the private sector, those millions who defected to the SNP, the Greens or Ukip would come rushing back.

Perhaps they simply believe that Labour should be a more competent version of the Tories. I happen to believe the Tories are extremely competent at introducing their horrendous policies. If this is what Labour really is to do, then it should simply politely bow and walk off the stage of history. Why even exist if it is to be a more competent privatiser and cutter than the Tories?

As John Harris and others note, social democracy is in crisis everywhere. Radical left parties in Spain and Greece are on the rise; in other countries, the populist right is benefiting. The crumbling of social democracy here may not simply mean Tory hegemony, but a flourishing populist right that eats into working-class communities, the current problems of Ukip notwithstanding. This is unacceptable, and a process many uber-Blairites would only accelerate. Labour’s leadership “debate” is so far anything but: platitudes instead of policies. So let’s have some of the latter and decide what future – if any – Labour actually has.