As the somewhat dull Labour Leadership contest trundles on, and the fallout from the bruising General Election defeat begins to settle, I have found myself thinking about who will be the best candidate for the Labour Leadership. Who has the strongest platform and the best chances of offering the party a renewed sense of purpose and a way forward. After considering a couple of the candidates, I am now edging towards supporting David Milliband. Here are a couple of thoughts about why.

Labour supporters, and the left in general, can usually be defined in two ways. Not left versus right, or old versus new, but scepticism versus pragmatism. On the one hand there is a strong and proud history in the Labour movement of people who are able to give a clear and well justified account of what is wrong with the world. These people can easily make recommendations as to how it can be put right. But as sceptics they tend to see opposition as a good thing, a chance to rediscover their purity of conviction and a chance to reconnect with their highest virtues.

Then there are the pragmatists. These are people who are more focussed on getting things done, and who are prepared to make deals with opponents in order to see things happen. Pragmatists deal with the reality of how things are, and not how they should be. But pragmatists run the risk of being thought of as unprincipled and without a solid base. Tony Blair, I’ve always thought, was a pragmatists, Gordon Brown was a sceptic. The fault-line of the New Labour project was not necessarily about what needed to be done, or how it was achieved. Instead, it was about the name or the idea in which it was done. Social justice, moral virtue, or survival - take your pick.

Moral values are waved about in the Labour Party at the moment like the red flag used to be. The party couldn’t understand why at the last election it’s call to arms around the moral virtue of fairness was ignored by large parts of the country. Unfortunately, as a good pragmatist would argue, people don’t actually want fairness from their political leaders. What they ask for instead, and rightly in my view, is the age old question: ‘what’s in it for us?’

Now I am probably going to be accused of cynicism in reporting this view, but people didn’t vote Tory because they thought the Tories would be fair. The voters where not mistaken. They new full well that the Tory party is going to be unfair in government. Voters will be happy with this unfairness as long as they don’t perceive themselves as being on the receiving end of this unfairness. If Labour understands this point, then the essential breakthrough into Middle England will be made that much easier. Politics is about building a coalition of self-interest. Middle England only every votes pragmatically, that is in their own interest. At the last election it was Cameron and Clegg who were able to wrestle the title of the pragmatic champion of Middle England by forming their grand coalition. If Labour can’t win this title back, then we will be out of government for a long time.

So, what do I think that we need to do, The first thing is that we get the language right. The most effective of the candidates at speaking directly and simply has been Diane Abbott. She speaks in short sentences that are understandable. They are clear and offer direct choices. Unfortunately, with most of the other candidates, and David particularly, the tendency is to offer an intelligent critique based on sub-clauses and technical language. While thinking through important issues requires a good brain and a wide vocabulary, getting people behind the ideas, behind a sense of purpose, needs a more instinctive, non-professional way of speaking. So keep it simple and keep it plain.

But this is nothing compared to the work that the next Labour leader has to do on the economy. Developing a robust response on growth is essential. Strong and clear attacks on the deficit hysteria presently engulfing the media and the coalition parties will help to restore confidence in Labour’s interventionist credibility. Ed Balls is doing well at the moment with this. However, the renewed economic activism that we are prepared to offer has to be sold as a strong, clear growth strategy. This must include help for new and small entrepreneurs and existing small and medium sized businesses. There are only three things that will enable the heart of the economy to beat strongly again  - Skills, Creativity/Innovation, and Opportunity. The next Labour leader must pledge to fund a business bank that can offer commercial loans to small businesses at competitive rates. If we don’t give priority to funding small and medium size businesses, then the rest of the economy will falter. It’s no good trying to get people into jobs if all we can do is add to the ranks of the public sector. Labour has to become a business making machine.

However, just because the coalition government is putting forward some structural reforms to the public sector, doesn’t mean that we have to reject them out of hand either. Indeed, some of them we should have put in to place long ago. Embracing Cameron’s reforms of the public sector to make services more directly accountable to the people who run them, and the people who use them, is essential. But why stop there? We need to make these reforms our own. By making them better and stronger we can really change the structure of our economy away from privilege and the status quo, to one that enhances social mobility.

We need to make sure that Cameron’s reforms including more accountability, transparency and a greater focus on achievement. Lets empower local democracy as a key driver of change by giving local authorities more economic responsibility for redevelopment and economic renewal. Add this to local voting reform and a much great transparency in decision making. Local democracy is not the ‘last line’ of defence, as David suggests, against the cuts that Cameron is making, but the first. I welcome David’s idea for the shadow cabinet to hold a place for local government. Labour has to build strong local councils who can really change things for the better. If Cameron wants localism, lets give him Labour Localism in buckets.

But why stop with reforming the public sector, and the range of organisations who are able to offer services to local people. Lets reform the commercial sector as well while we are at it. Lets lower the competition threshold that structures how companies work nationally from 20% to 10%. Lets introduce more competition by allowing more players into the market. At the same time we need to make the process of mutallisation easier, both to allow the users and the workers in a company to have a say in how it works, but to make it harder for speculation in the economy to spin out of control. Most importantly, we have to tackle the commercial property market so that it stops sucking investment into South East bubbles, and prevents small, family businesses setting up by charging outrageous rents.

The starting point for many of our changes is to take a good, hard look at the Labour Party itself. We need more democracy within Labour Party, not less, we need devolution to the nations and regions, and a federated organisation with greater autonomy. Never again should a small group of people shoulder the responsibility of making Labour electable, or control all the power to do so. With this freedom will come responsibility, and finding the right balance won’t be easy, but communication and information technology has changed the world, and our party needs to catch up fast. David’s support for Labour Leadership academy is crucial in this. Leadership from the middle of our party is not an option but is essential. It will be the only way that we can reconnect with voters who are looking for examples of Labour in action.

The best way for us to win at the next General Election is not for us to retreat to our comfort zones, but to challenge everyone in the party to become doers. People who are intent on getting things done and making things happen, rather than waiting for someone else, a new leader, whoever, to come along and do it for us.