This should be their finest hour, but the response from the Labour Left to capitalism's biggest crisis since 1929 has been as limp as a stale parsnip. Perhaps they were too stunned by falling stocks to speak, or perhaps the union bosses at the Labour Party conference in Manchester were personally embarrassed, smarting from a mortgage too far. Instead of withering satire about the Blair-Brown end-of-the-pier shove-a-penny economy, we heard a plaintive request for windfall taxes on energy companies. Instead of a clarion call for a national energy plan, the faint-hearted unions were there with the begging bowls: “Please, Sir, we want some more.”

Like naughty children, the unions would dip their fingers in the oily bowl of custard and, even better, tax those City bonuses hard. These bankers are “an amoral class without a care”, Derek Simpson, joint leader of Unite, the trade union, said.

This is not politics, this whine for more pudding from Labour's nursery. It is religion - the dreary moralising Methodism of the British Left that caricatures behaviour as naughty or nice, rather than as clever or stupid. Someone has forgotten who borrowed all the money. This is not a tale of City greed v the downtrodden working man. It is the triumph of mass consumption over class privilege; it is about the homes, but it is also about the cars, the flatscreen TVs, the racks of Primark frocks, the consumer detritus that litters a million British working-class homes. It is the lifestyle of people who a quarter of a century ago were struggling to fill the gas meter but who last year took a foreign holiday.

It was those blood-sucking vampires at Canary Wharf who made possible the Great Spend of the Millennium, when a cheap loan became available to all. Are these Labour preachers oblivious of the great capital transfer to the poor that took place over the past 15 years? Who stood behind the toxic mortgages underwritten by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Blue-collar America. Who borrowed from Halifax, the former building society that clings to the apron of Lloyds TSB? British working men and women.

It was social engineering on a vast scale. Since the War, Labour governments tinkered, trying to create a “fair” economy. They mostly failed and, half a century later, rampant capitalism did the job, transferring hundreds of billions of pounds into the pockets of the less-well-off. Much of it will never be paid back, except by taxes, and perhaps the burden will be eased by a dose of inflation if the US Federal Reserve Bank finally loses its bottle. There was an unwritten rule among bankers that you did not lend to poor people. It was assumed they would fritter it away, but a different view prevailed over the past decade, that a mortgage was just a statistical risk. Home loans to the poor was just a few more ticks over Libor.

That's as near as you will get to democratic socialism on this Earth. But Labour's preachers see it through a biblical veil, where lenders are loan sharks, debt is an evil temptress, the handmaiden of drink, and blue-collar defaulters are the undeserving poor.

We could travel this Dickensian road and re-establish debtor's prison for reckless lenders as well as improvident borrowers. In our contemporary Marshalsea (the Victorian prison for those who could not repay) you might find Dick Fuld, imprisoned by the creditors of Lehman Brothers for leading his bank to ruin. The hapless former chief executive would lead a life not without comfort. Like the old Marshalsea, his family could bring him food and the occasional bottle of fine wine. Gaunt and bent over, he would scan The Wall Street Journal and fiddle with his BlackBerry, trying to ignore the shouts from across the prison corridor, where another debtor, a former homeowner from Detroit, berates her teenage children for littering the room with crack pipes and pizza cartons.

Instead of moralising, the Left could plan. On Monday, while the unions prattled on about unfairness, there was a reminder of even bigger problems looming on the horizon. The oil price soared as traders bludgeoned by too much news flailed about, seeking equilibrium. The extravagant bailout of the American mortgage market changed the recessionary mood and the price soared to $120 a barrel before it cooled off. We now see that $100 a barrel has become a benchmark for the post-credit-crunch economy. It reflects weak oil output from the West, political insecurity and Opec's growing power over the remaining global reserves.

Oil is too expensive. We cannot easily adjust to this price and the Government is hamstrung, thrashing about as it demands subsidies for the poor while imposing huge electricity price increases in the form of mandatory use of inefficient wind power. While Britain worries about energy insecurity, the Prime Minister is about to hand over the nation's biggest power generator and the future of the national nuclear energy programme to EDF, a company that is owned by a foreign government.

Energy should be the project of the Left - fuel is Britain's weakest link. We don't need nationalisations, but we do need a national energy plan, separate from Brussels and sceptical of the prospects for a new Kyoto that would bind China to carbon reduction. We need a plan that is dismissive of fashion and focused on the cheap and efficient generation of electrons from coal, gas, oil or uranium. We need targets and directed investment because we know that no business is capable of planning for 20 years, but a government can and should do so.

carl.mortished@thetimes.co.uk

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