In probably the best long feature I’ve read this year, Amelia Gentleman visits the infamous Glasgow estate of Easterhouse – which kick-started Iain Duncan Smith on his crusade to help fix ‘broken Britain’. Despite being a ‘popular destination for politicians and celebrities on poverty tours’, Gentleman writes, things have hardly got any better since it came under the spotlight.

She talks to students, parents and teachers from Easterhouse, and they all agree that simply characterising the estate as ‘broken’ is wrong. There are causes of the problems afflicting them. People lack opportunities, wages are lower than the dole, and above all, residents have lost the sense that things could (and should) be better.

‘This is not an example of broken Britain,’ Gentleman writes, ‘but of a Britain that is still profoundly unfair.’

But the strange thing is, even though ‘fairness’ is a word we hear all the time the current pseudo-campaign, we never hear its corollary, ‘equality’. We are all ‘equal’ before the law, and we have ‘equal rights’, but the notion of economic equality seems to have disappeared altogether from the political lexicon.

Despite the fact that the evidence overwhelmingly shows that the symptoms of what David Cameron dubs a ‘social recession’ are much more prevalent in unequal societies than more equal ones, neither of the main political parties has any commitments on this fundamental issue. The idea of equality should be underpinning the policies of any party which makes claims to ‘fairness’, as the Observer pointed out last month (with regard to cutting the deficit):

“Pledges of change and fairness are hollow when they do not have equality at their core.”

Perhaps the conspicuous absence of the word ‘equality’ from our political debate stems from the abolition of the original Clause IV in Labour’s constitution, and the subsequent embracing of a deregulated financial sector by Labour to bankroll its social spending. If anything has been learnt since the collapse of Lehman Bros in late ’08, though, it must surely be that such a Faustian pact is no longer viable. The pragmatism that seemed justify the move has been exposed as folly, and any hope of a return to such a combination of economic liberalism and social democracy now seems laughable, cowering in the shadow of the debt that resulted from Labour’s mypoia.

Britain isn’t broken (even the Economist says it’s not), but there are still problems facing it. Ignoring one of the chief causes of them – economic inequality – will only make things worse. Voters aren’t going to vote for more of the same Labour government we have had for the past decade – it’s change or die for Labour.

To get the fiscal benefits of what seemed like inexorable growth – and placate the City that drove it – Labour had to abandon its commitment to equality. They didn’t bank on the bubble bursting. Now that is has, what better time to examine afresh their core principles, and reinstate the one that used to distinguish Labour as a party of the people: equality.

‘A future fair for all’ is a nice tag line – but without the principles to achieve such a vision, it’s just more of the same empty rhetoric that is turning voters off by the drove at every election. There is an opportunity for Labour to make that phrase actually mean something at the coming election, to capitalise on the public desire for a renewed honesty and ideological commitment in our politics. Even so, I’m not holding my breath.