THE actions we take today will shape the planet for the next millennia – and without fundamental reform the future looks chaotic.

This is the premise of Go Big, a new book of political thought and ideas by the former Labour leader, Ed Miliband. The Kentish Town-based Doncaster North MP, who is also the shadow business secretary, has spent the past six years considering the sort of world progressive politics can build.

“What we do in the next few years will shape the next few hundred years,” he says.

“We are facing the ongoing economic and social shock of deindustrialisation, a deeply exploitative world of work, fears about prospects for the next generation. There is a deep-seated wish for something better.”

Miliband says the pandemic has, like a tide going out, exposed what lay beneath the water.

“Our society is so riven by inequalities in income and wealth that these differences have profoundly shaped how we have been affected by the pandemic, from the quality of life under lockdown to matters of life and death,” he says.

“There is yawning disconnect between the best in us – who we are and the values we hold – and the society and economy we have. It is time to reconnect our society with our values.”

The book identifies key issues and then offers practical ways to tackle them. Drawing on evidence-based policy-making from around the globe, he cherry picks ideas that have proven worth when applied elsewhere, and illustrates the difference they could have if introduced in the UK.

Go Big sprang from a podcast he hosted called Reasons To Be Cheerful, which looked for people and ideas who were changing the world.

“Losing an election doesn’t have much going for it, but it made me step back and reflect,” he recalls. “I thought – what are the big ideas?”

He rattles through such policies as a universal basic income, how to fix the housing crisis, how to put care at the heart of our society, why measuring a country’s well-being using a gross domestic product system is damaging, tackling the climate crisis, reforming welfare, justice – it is a play list of the great issues we face, and Miliband applies a number of fixes, some from traditional left orthodoxy, others from pioneering projects shown to work by different-hued governments.

“A universal basic income – and it is the most difficult idea in my book to achieve – would be transformative,” he says. “It would produce dramatic change, giving everyone a foundation in society.”

By considering policies from places as disparate as Alaska, Finland and Portugal, Miliband says the solutions to what seem insurmountable issues are readily available.

“For all the problems, there is a solution – affordable housing, more time off for parents, and putting care at the centre of the economy.

“For example, proper universal childcare is the best investment you could make. It’s strange – people talk of investing in roads and bridges, but don’t use the term in the same way with childcare. Instead it is called a cost or spending. But it is the best economic return you can get. It raises educational outcomes and reduces crime.”

The ideas have been critiqued in publications such as the New Statesman, where Miliband was accused of offering well-versed arguments already put forward by the left and social democrats.

But he argues this does not detract. That a universal basic income is not a new idea doesn’t mean it’s a bad one.

And Miliband states that we only have to look back over history to see how change happens. He points out that there were times when the idea of an apartheid South African regime collapsing seemed a long way off, and how attitudes towards sexual equality, anti-racism and social liberalism are harbingers of a world that can be better.

And as with all well-versed people of the left, he refers to the inspiration of the post-war government.

“Clement Attlee’s government was a response not simply to the immediate catastrophe of the wars but to long-standing injustices,” he says.

“William Beveridge’s report in the midst of the Second World War identified the five giants of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness, but it was the experience of the war years which super-charged the belief that eradicating them was a priority. The injustices and inequalities that have been building since before the events of the past decade require an equivalent remaking.

“There is a new settlement to be built. As we recover from the coronavirus, it is the least the British people have the right to expect. We will not achieve this unless a different guiding spirit animates the way we run the country.”

The MP believes that we are currently living through what he describes using a footballing metaphor – that the neo-liberal settlement, ushered in by Thatcherism and Reaganomics in the 1970s, is about to have a full-time whistle blown.

“The years between 1979 and 2008 was one era and we are now in extra time – 13 years of extra time,” he says.

He cites how the financial crisis showed how a model based on laissez-faire economics and deregulated markets turned out to be “a recipe not just for roaring inequality but also a massive economic crash, a crash that ordinary people – who had no responsibility for it – paid for with their jobs and the austerity that followed.

“David Cameron’s argument – and not the one about me bringing chaos if I was the prime minister – was that I was essentially wrong in my analysis of the challenges we face. The main campaigning points of Cameron and Osborne was everything was OK, vote for us.

“That’s not the case today – even Boris Johnson argues something different.”

That tacit acknowledgement was shown by the millions who voted to leave the EU, and a Tory prime minister who now apparently accepts how broken the UK appears to be, shows a sea change in viewpoint argues Miliband.

“Tories cannot peddle the old Thatcherite orthodoxy,” he says. “It is smoke and mirrors in terms of what they want to do, but it illustrates a zeitgeist.

“Deep injustices remain and it is high time we did something about them. If we do not, other pernicious forces will fill the gap. Unless progressive change is not just promised but delivered, the appeal of the strong man, of false, simplistic solutions, will grow ever stronger and more dangerous.”

• Go Big: How To Fix Our World. By Ed Miliband, Penguin, £18.99