The Liberal Democrats, and the Liberals before them, have not had much time in power over the last century. 1906 was the last time a majority Liberal government was elected, though it has been the junior partner in coalition governments since then. However, the Liberals were certainly the party of ideas in the last century. The Labour welfare state established after 1945 owes a debt to the programmes of that 1906 government, and to the highly influential report on welfare reform written during the war by a Liberal, William Beveridge.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes was a Liberal, listened to by Liberal leader Lloyd George in the 1920s, who produced the radical manifesto ‘We can Conquer Unemployment’ for the 1929 election. It may have been ahead of its time then, but the ideas behind it were later implemented by both Labour and Tory governments in the generation after the War.

It is just as vital for the Liberal Democrats to be the party of ideas in this century, because ideas are in short supply.

The Labour Party fumbles along after its loveless landslide victory, much as the Labour-led government did in 1929, facing an economic crisis it doesn’t know how to cope with. It wants to spend but feels it can’t. That way lies Truss and another lettuce, it thinks. When it comes to taxes, it is afraid to raise the right ones and will get less than it wants from the wrong ones. Its hope is to produce growth, because that is the painless way to redistribute money to the less well-off, but it is afraid to talk about an essential precondition of growth, which is a return to the EU single market. It is full of big talk about an English Silicon Valley and the opportunities provided by Heathrow expansion, but it knows that even if these were measures to produce growth (which is highly debatable) the results will not be seen until long after the next election. Does Labour really want to campaign on the basis of: ‘We’ll be able to help the NHS properly when we’ve got more flights in the 2030s’? Meanwhile it stalls, blames the fading memory of its predecessor and in truth has no idea of what to do.

So what should it do? There are plenty of suggestions that can be made, but let us take one example, which is very clearly Liberal Democrat policy. It should introduce a system of free personal care and raise the pay of care workers so that there is a specific minimum wage for those in care work. This is a policy which Lib Dem leader Ed Davey has laid stress on and campaigned on in the general election last July. It would be a truly radical policy, one which made personal care as much as medical treatment free at the point of delivery. If that could be delivered, it would be a development almost as significant as the founding of the National Health Service itself.

But when you ask: ‘Can we afford it?’, part of the difficulty is that you can estimate the cost, and should estimate the cost, but you can’t arrive at a certain result. It is obviously a policy designed to increase the number of people who can live independent lives, away from a care home and a hospital bed. There are clear savings there, but there is bound to be an element of guesswork about calculating how much the savings will be. Yes, you can work out how much the extra pay will cost, and you can probably estimate fairly accurately the cost of training additional staff. But knowing exactly how many hospital beds you might be able to free up, thereby reducing the necessity of so much extra spending on new hospitals, is bound to be uncertain. You know it’s a sensible thing to do, and you know it will save money in years to come, but you can’t be precise about how much.

Starmer and Reeves can be forgiven their frequent attacks of nerves. They have five years to stop a landslide for Labour on about one-third of the vote turning into a landslide for Reform on one-third of the vote (Labour should reform the voting system to stop that happening but show no interest in doing more than tinker with the constitution). They have nightmares about that, and at the same time nightmares about becoming another lettuce if they spend too much now. But they cannot let their nightmares stop them from doing anything when they’re awake.

Nye Bevan used to point out that the Health Service came into being when there was no money after the War (the Marshall Plan was not enough to fund it). Ed Davey’s plans for an expanded National Care and Health Service deserve to be implemented now, despite the economic difficulties we face. There’s no point Labour living out their time without any initiatives beyond putting a few extra planes into the air over London in the 2030s. A Liberal voice is needed in this century, as it was in the last, to put backbone into Labour’s milk-and-water policies.

* Mark Corner is a UK national, who teaches economic history and philosophy at the University of Leuven, is married to a Czech EU official and lives in Brussels. He has just published A Tale of Two Unions suggesting that Brexit may damage the British Union unless the UK becomes more positive about the way the European Union is structured.