BY JOVE, they got it! Eventually. It took the threat of Labour backbenchers in sufficient numbers effectively to blow the Government’s Budget out of the water to persuade a Labour Government to go back from a tax measure that would have made 5.3 million of Britain’s poorest even worse off and which could have pushed 300,000 below the official poverty line.

The shame is that it took this ultimate sanction, interpreted in a counter-threatening way by Downing Street as a vote of confidence in the Government, to bring Gordon Brown’s administration into line with the values, policies and principles of the party for which each and every one of them stood for election.

The strength of the voices rising in anger (some of which we publish this week as an eloquent cannon of what the Government were up against before Chancellor Alistair Darling bowed to the inevitable in his act of midweek contrition) was fired by the fact that this went beyond all that Labour seeks power to achieve.

The spectacle of a former Tory Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, lecturing Labour on the rights and wrongs of taxing the poor was one of the low points of the affair, together with Treasury minister Angela Eagle describing the Budget as “progressive”.

The devil will be in the detail and, while the rebellion may be off, MPs will justly apply the closest scrutiny to what Mr Darling comes up with and will retain intense pressure on him over the next few months to ensure it is fair and just.

Now, in the sudden relative calm which follows the recent storm, there is a need to pause and reflect on what the effective defeat and subsequent U-turn on this measure means for the direction of the Government on other significant policies.

There are other issues on which a period of stern reflection, rather than defeat and reversal down the line, would benefit the strategists inside Numbers 10 and 11 . There is now an opportunity to make a virtue out of Mr Brown’s avowed new willingness to demonstrate that he is willing to listen – to “get it” and he informed the Parliamentary Labour Party that he now does. It is an opportunity to do what he has indicated he has long wanted to achieve – tangible change from the previous administration. Because it starts from here. It is a time to take stock of the broad taxation system, who it affects and how. The extension of the review announced in the Budget into poor families is to be welcomed. But if fresh thinking is to infuse the next Budget, and the tone of the language of aspiration around the autumn’s pre-Budget report, attention must also be paid to stronger action against the non-doms and the hedge-fund managers.

It is also a time to reflect on other policies. The Private Finance Initiative should not be set in stone, like a financial deadweight around the nation. Trident requires a more serious review of its need set against the vast £76 billion expenditure. Post offices, national identity cards and 42-day detention are all getting in the way of issues a real Labour Government would more profitably pursue, both for the people it is supposed to represent and the votes it expects in return.

The party’s new round of policy-making is about to get into full flood. It must be shown to be working in a fully democratic and representative way. The trade unions have serious causes on their agenda which should not be dismissed in the misguided conception that such contempt is good for voters. The public sector, where those votes are leaving Labour, needs a better deal.

Next week’s local elections will also deliver a message that should cause the leadership some deep reflection. If they are bad, they should not be dismissed as typical mid-term blues. David Cameron is still failing, even with the Government in such dire straits recently, to show that he is a capable alternative Prime Minister, looking lost rather than decisive.

We’ve had the continuity and it hasn’t worked. The Labour Government was in trouble and needed help. It received that help from the Labour MPs who stood their ground to get it back on tracks that are closer to its core, founding ideology.