This year’s Labour conference has been extremely light on policy – but Gordon Brown’s speech went a long way to redressing the balance, providing a welter of significant pledges plus a dose of crowd-pleasing Tory-thumping and the inevitable lecture on Gordon’s famous values.

At a typical conference, each of the governing party’s ministers throws a few new policies into their speech, generating news content and providing something to excite party members, journalists and interest groups. But this year, ministers have concentrated on trying to rouse the party from its sulky depression. No time remains to launch new policies before the election; the priority has been to enthuse the grassroots and, above all, to persuade the country that it does matter which way they vote.

It is also relevant, of course, that even this late in the electoral cycle, some sections of the Labour party still have doubts about Brown’s leadership. In these circumstances, the prime minister’s allies in cabinet have made it their job to demonstrate their loyalty, while it has been Brown’s responsibility to sketch out the bones of a fourth Labour term.

Any biologist studying these bones would surely be convinced that he had stumbled across the partial remains of three very different animals, for Brown attempted in his speech to move in three quite different directions. One set of policies were targeted at the general public: the group that he tirelessly, endlessly referred to as the “decent, hard-working majority”. A second were designed to rouse, please and enthuse Labour’s members, many of whom have been dying to hear less about hard times ahead and more about a traditional Labour agenda. And a third – sometimes sitting oddly with the second group – comprised ‘triangulation’ policies aimed at denying political territory to the Conservative Party.

Brown began with a bullet-point list of Labour achievements, before moving quickly onto what he clearly sees as his greatest moment: Labour’s response to the credit crunch and recession. Few now argue that the government was wrong to prop up the banks, pump money into the economy and help to catalyse an international consensus on the need for action, and this is clearly a strong suit; the PM made much of Cameron and Osborne’s scepticism and hesitation. “The Conservative Party were faced with the economic call of the century, and they called it wrong,” he thundered.

Brown then moved onto much thinner ice. “What let the world down last autumn was not just bankrupt institutions but a bankrupt ideology,” he said. “What failed was the Conservative idea that markets always self-correct but never self-destruct. What failed was the right wing fundamentalism that says you just leave everything to the market”.

Coming from the man who as chancellor championed the financial services sector, who shifted to a system of ‘risk-based’ – ie. light-touch – regulation and worked to make London a more comfortable place for banks and hedge funds than Frankfurt or even New York, this represented either world-class chutzpah or a recognition that he’d been wrong in his approach to the City. This being the world of politics, of course, it was chutzpah: an excellent Yiddish word, most easily translated as the ability to murder both your parents, then coolly plead for mercy because you are an orphan. “Bankers had lost sight of basic British values, acting responsibly and acting fairly,” he said. “The values that we, the hard working majority, live by every day.”

The hard-working majority, as embodied in Prime Minister Brown, then stuck it to the bankers for some little time – although it never became clear exactly how this disapproval would become manifest in government policy. “We will pass a new law to intervene on bankers’ bonuses whenever they put the economy at risk,” he said, sketching out an ideal which will surely be impossible to translate into hard law in any meaningful way. “And any director of any of our banks who is negligent will be disqualified from holding such a post.”

Rising to new heights of chutzpah, Brown then attempted to present his government – 12 years after Blair’s ’97 victory – as the party of change. Labour is “always a party of restless and relentless reformers”, he said. “This coming election will not be a contest for a fourth term Labour government, but for the first Labour government of this new global age.”

A few in the audience, perhaps suspecting that the government must bear some share of responsibility for catapulting us all into this brave new recessionary age, looked a little nonplussed at this – but their doubts were soon washed away as Brown embarked on a dramatic list of party-pleasing policies. A £1bn innovation fund will stand in for our routed venture capitalists during the recession. The Post Office will be freed to move back into banking services. Schools funding will rise over the next five years. A national insurance hike will ensure that public services continue to improve. Out-of-hours GP appointments will be available for everyone.

Sensing that Gordon has lost some of his caution, that he was finally realising Labour members’ hopes that he would shift the government leftwards, the audience were now getting genuinely excited. And at this point, Brown really got going with the big clunking fist. Given a Labour election victory, the minimum wage will increase annually for the next five years – and so will child benefit and child tax credits. The link will be restored between earnings and the state pension. We will have a democratic Lords and a referendum on limited proportional representation. There will be free childcare for two-year-olds. The crowd loved it.

They were so fired up, in fact, that when Gordon moved on to anti-social behaviour – ground that David Cameron has tried to make his own with talk of the “broken society” – the audience kept clapping at some remarkably illiberal ideas. Rather than getting council homes, 16- and 17-year-old parents in receipt of benefits will in future be “placed in a network of supervised homes,” said Brown. “These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads, but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly.”

Coming from the Tories, these policies would be slammed by mainstream Labour thinkers as inflicting the dysfunctional care system on another set of children; as a ham-fisted piece of social engineering which would further weaken young mums’ tenuous links into mainstream society. And Brown threw in compulsory family intervention projects, ASBOs’ extension to troublemakers’ parents, a retreat on alcohol licensing, and a tightening of the points-based immigration system to further undercut Tory terrain.

Dutifully, the audience kept on clapping – but they were much, much happier about Brown’s next announcement. “In the next Parliament there will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens,” he said. It is a little ironic that – apart from his pledge of support for Britain’s military and the obligatory, concluding standing ovation – Brown received his loudest and most prolonged applause for promising to drop a key element of government policy.

Brown went on to promise new treatment rights for cancer patients, a new national agency to develop care and support for elderly people, and new sanctions for corrupt MPs: all populist policies that should play well in the country at large. And then he began wrapping up.

Even after an hour-long speech, some listeners noticed that Brown had left a couple of glaring gaps. The idea of a series of head-to-head debates with Cameron, widely floated by Labour spin doctors beforehand, did not make an appearance – an omission that, like the ‘election that never was’ a year ago, smacks of lack of courage. Still more obviously, Brown gave his audience few clues about where essential cost savings will be made. “Every single pledge we make comes with a price tag attached, and a clear plan for how that cost will be met,” he said – but these price tags and resourcing plans remain, at present, a mystery.

It may also turn out that Brown has once again tacked too far to the right in his attempt to outflank the Tories. In fringe meetings after his speech, party members expressed horror at their leader’s comments about teenage mothers: “It took me back to the ‘50s, when single mums would be carted off to institutions,” said one. “That’s not where we want to be.” Perhaps swing voters will like the policy, but Brown risks being forced into a U-turn – as he was on 42 days’ detention and the ten percent tax rate – by experts and professionals who think the idea misguided and counterproductive.

Despite these dangers, Brown has succeeded in his main objective: following a revitalising conference and a speech that pleased many party supporters, questions over his leadership are now highly unlikely to crystallise into a challenge before the election. Labour can boast of a brave and intelligent response to the financial crisis, and the party’s rank and file have a new set of policies that will make sense on the doorstep. The problem is that, following a 12-year stint in government, a painful recession and an ugly exposure of politicians’ greed over expenses, many voters will have closed their ears to Brown’s carefully enunciated arguments.

Policy pledges

• to promise training, education, work experience or apprenticeships for all under-18s, and to expand university places;
• tighter laws on bank bonuses and punishments for “negligent” bankers;
• creation of a national investment corporation to finance developing businesses;
• the Post Office will offer banking services;
• “low carbon zones” will foster new green jobs;
• rising investment for schools over the next five years;
• 10,000 skilled internships to be created in small businesses;
• “up to” 10,000 green job placements;
• 0.5% rise in national insurance contributions in 2011;
• a right for all patients to see GPs at evenings and weekends;
• five-year rises in the minimum wage, child benefit and child tax credit;
• restoration of the link between earnings and state pensions;
• free childcare for 0.25m deprived two-year-olds;
• compulsory family intervention projects for 50,000 disruptive families;
• “supervised homes” rather than council flats for 16- and 17-year old mothers;
• ASBOs to involve orders placed on young people’s parents;
• councils to have the right “to ban 24-hour drinking throughout a community”;
• maximum time limits on police response times;
• no compulsory ID cards in the next Parliament;
• biometric ID cards to require no more information than existing passports;
• right for cancer patients to have diagnostic tests within a week of seeing GP;
• new National Care Service, beginning with free personal care for elderly people “with the highest needs”;
• the right for constituents to deselect MPs in cases of proven financial corruption where Parliament has failed to act;
• removal of the hereditary peers from the Lords’
• making the Lords “an accountable and democratic second chamber’
• a referendum on moving to the Alternative Vote system of proportional representation “early in the next Parliament”.