2nd opinion: Rebels without a cause

he taste of rebellion is sweetly addictive, they say. Now that Labour's mutineers have broken the spell of prime ministerial supremacy and defied the whips, there will be no stopping them. Rebel MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Bob Marshall-Andrews have now been joined by Joyce Quin and Robin Cook, the latter no less a figure than leader of the house before he handed in his resignation last week. It's no longer the legion of the damned; there's now some real muscle in the ranks of the recalcitrants.

So, one might go on, since the bulk of the insurgents on the Labour side are to the left of the government, doesn't that increase the pressure for an Old Labour or even "socialist" revision of Blairite policies? Such as an end to stock transfer and the right to buy, a betterment levy and bigger public support for the construction of social housing?

Well, the trouble with this scenario is that it implies that there is actually a "left-wing" take on housing.

Even if there were rumbling discontent on the backbenches, even if Tony Blair and his ministers were under new pressure to pay heed to Old Labour, what exactly would this alternative housing policy look like? If the quality of rebel thinking about the United Nations, the UK's military posture, the Middle East and the new world disorder is anything to go by, any alternative is likely to be bitty, incoherent, sentimental and shaped by a tremendous desire to go back to the future.

So is there, in fact, a new bloc of anti-Blair opinion within Labour's ranks? Labour is likely to lose seats in the council elections taking place across England in May and the arithmetic of representation inside the Scottish parliament and the Welsh Assembly will certainly change, to the disadvantage of Scottish Labour leader Jack Connell and his Welsh counterpart Rhodri Morgan. It will not, however, be clear what the people (that's to say the fraction of the people who are going to bother to vote) are saying. Is voting for a Tory councillor really a meaningful statement of the public desire to see more progressive housing policy? Will voting Scottish Nationalist secure an increase in the huge relative spending advantages Scotland currently enjoys within the United Kingdom?

Not really. All that the forthcoming elections will demonstrate is that the public mood is febrile, that there is discontent about the war and that there is a lot of mid-term moaning about the Blair government. There is no mandate here for policy change – on the domestic front, at least. But even if there were, what might the left alternative look like?

Despite MPs’ mutiny, I have heard no sustained, rigorous criticism that would set the government on a different path

The ructions inside Labour over Iraq have been instructive. There's been no deep thought given, for example, to the UK's position in the world – whether the UK should retain its permanent seat on the UN Security Council and whether UK defence expenditure is too great. Instead, there has been a lot of bleating about multilateralism and a naïve wishing-away of the fact of American hegemony. Instead of thought, what we have seen has merely been carping at Blair and Bush and a great deal of "we shouldn't be starting from this position".

On the domestic front, it is pretty much the same. I keep an eye on the outputs of the various think tanks. Where are the critiques of Blairism and the government's fundamental strategy for tax, the private economy or social structure? On housing, most recent thinking has come, if anywhere, from Politeia and other Tory outfits.

Backbench Labour MPs are said to be unhappy about foundation hospitals and the private finance initiative. And there is a lot to be said, much of it critical, about the vagueness of Alan Milburn's proposals for restructuring the hospitals. You don't have to be left-wing, either, to notch up a set of profound misgivings about the effectiveness of PFI schemes or their eventual cost.

But these are details. There is no sustained, rigorous criticism, at least that I have heard, that would set the government of this country on a different path.

Back to housing. The political fact is that deputy prime minister John Prescott, housing minister Lord Rooker and their colleagues have not been challenged. There was no principled rejection, even by Labour's "usual suspects" of the Communities Plan; no grand coalition of MPs from the West Midlands, North-east and North-west has come together to protest at Labour's Southern strategy for housing. Backbench friends of council housing have been singularly ineffective – the fate of stock transfer depends on the Treasury and financial calculations much more than on political opposition.