"Por el cambio" was the Spanish socialists' election slogan in 1982. "For change" or "for the change", all the more emphatically. The poster showed the boyish face of Felipe Gonzalez against a blue sky background. No hammers and sickles, no blazing red banners; rather, a message of youth, freshness, smiling and change. Something rather like Tony Blair in 1997. Felipe (as he is known by friend and foe) spent the next 14 years as prime minister of the Spanish government. Longer than Mrs Thatcher; and who knows how long relative to Blair?

For all the things he did in that time, a smiling and still youthful-looking 57-year-old Felipe said in Dublin recently, one thing eluded him. "As socialists, we redistributed very well. We redistributed wealth, healthcare, education. But we never managed to redistribute the capacity to commit oneself to changing the world." That capacity for entrepreneurial action resided in Spain in a small section of the middle class when he came into office, and there it remained when he left.

It was a small capacity in Spain, he said, because traditionally they had many "rentistas" (rent-seekers, those who want easy, non-competitive profits) but few "capitalistas" (yes, capitalists, those who put their money at risk to earn profit in a competitive environment). A socialist bemoaning the absence of capitalists? We've come a long way.

Socialists like himself, he said, had always spoken about employment, the need for employment, the duty to maintain employment, and so on. But they had never spoken about employers, nor understood how people became employers, nor catered for employers' needs. Small to medium sized company employers were particularly neglected, even though they created and sustained most employment. Socialists in government worked hard to try to ameliorate people's lives, but it was always about solving people's problems for them, not about helping them develop the capacity to take control and solve problems themselves.

So, now in his retirement from active politics (though he remains even in retirement the most popular politician in Spain), he says he wants to do something to change fundamental attitudes about commitment to making change happen. In English, the commonplace word for this is "empowerment". What Felipe was talking about was not a devolution of power from government to people but an change in the mentality of people at all levels of society. He wants people to discover "the epic of reform, not of revolution", the ability to work for incremental, meaningful change. All this begged for a comparison with Mrs Thatcher's long reign and the shift in attitudes she produced in Britain. Mrs Thatcher brought about attitudinal change not simply by talking about it as a good idea, but through specific policy changes. What role would he see for lower income and capital gains tax rates in fostering an entrepreneurial culture, I ask?

Mr Gonzalez was clearly not ready yet to say that taxes should have been cut. Of course, he agreed, policies were important. He preferred to comment that a large part of Mrs Thatcher's success was that the entire labour movement had put itself beyond the pale, as evidenced by a strike by grave-diggers in the late 1970s.

One cannot dodge forever a conclusion about tax rates. Tax rates alone cannot stimulate an entrepreneurial environment, but they must surely be part of the solution at the macro level. At the micro level of individual companies and choices by individual people, a whole set of educational policies and incentives must be put in place to foster an entrepreneurial culture.

That is a culture not just of risk-taking with capital. It is also about non-government organisations and people building coalitions and taking innovative actions towards the achievement of public or social goods. Understood like this, entrepreneurship is about making things happen without relying on, and waiting for, the over-arching, slow-moving and ultimately coercive power of government.

That is not to say that a public sector organisation cannot have an entrepreneurial attitude, but it is difficult to achieve and the evidence bears this out.

Mr Gonzalez is no has-been in European social democracy. He is involved in developing new ideas for the Socialist International. These ideas are filtering through to our Labour Party - which may argue it is in the forefront in some - but are also available to all other parties. We are some distance down the road from Spain already. If only our discussion about future policy were not so crowded out by tribunals, scandals and an ultimately backward-looking obsession with one 1980s Taoiseach.