It’s a wonderful place, brimming over with old Rupert the Bear annuals and old copies of the New Musical Express. If you pop in now you can probably still pick up an old copy of Tariq Ali’s 1968 newspaper Black Dwarf.

My best recent find was an orginal copy of the 1967 New Left May Day Manifesto, priced Two Shillings and Sixpence from 41 years ago.

The first page explains that it was “edited for a group of socialist workers, writers and teachers” by Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and Edward Thopmson.

With May Day approaching, see if you think the first paragraph sets out a familiar scenario: “For nearly eighty years, the international labour movement has taken May Day as a festival: an international celebration and commitment. On this May Day, 1967, as we look at our world, we see the familiar priorities of of money and power, but now with one difference: that their agent, in Briatin, is a Labour government.”

“It is a strange paradox, which must be faced and understood. In an economic crisis, with the wages of millions of workers frozen, the wife of a Labour Prime Minister launches a Polaris nuclear submarine.

“While thousands of our people are without homes, while our schools are overcrowded and our health service breaking under prolonged strain, a Labour cabinet orders what it calls a new generation of military planes, as if that, now, was the priority meaning of generation. Britain appears east of Suez not as a friend but as what Labour politicians call a military presence: battleships, bombing planes, armed troops.”

I have my doubts about the ongoing nostalgia for the 1968 generation, but this seems to sum up pretty much everything that socialists have always though about the Labour Party. I’m not sure Sarah Brown is about to launch a nuclear submarine, but pretty much every other word could have been written today and regularly is.

But who is to blame for the impasse between the Labour Party and wider progressive thought? I have argued in the New Statesman that the Brown government needs to listen to the concerns of the left and not always revert to its instinct to sneer.

But at the same time, it’s up to the left to come up with serious ideas for change. A new May Day Manifesto is well overdue.