This time last year, Labour languished 15 points behind the Tories. This weekend, the latest Survation poll puts Labour eight points ahead, ending what seemed an impossible impasse.
It’s good news – for Labour, for anyone who wants to avoid hard Brexit, for those of us angered by a government willing to pander to Trump and extremism and for millions who have suffered the sharp consequences of a brutal, ideological assault on public spending in recent years.
Opinion polls only ever provide a snapshot, but in doorstep conversations across the country, it feels increasingly that Labour has two key assets any aspiring government needs.
We face a weak, divided government that, reminiscent of the Major years, has lost both authority and purpose. Theresa May’s shambolic, exhausted Tories have seen their unifying argument – that austerity is inevitable – destroyed by a willingness to throw money at the DUP while continuing to starve the police, the NHS and social care of the funding it badly needs.
A prime minister who only a year ago seemed strong now appears arrogant. Taking for granted the support of Tory remainers, older voters and swaths of the north, her manifesto’s draconian policies on social care and foxhunting reminded wavering voters that the nasty party was back. The reluctance to step in and help Manchester after a brutal terrorist attack on young families, contrasted unfavourably even with the Major’s government which came quickly after the 1996 bombing to offer help to rebuild.
Just as in 1996, the energy lies with Labour. The 2017 election galvanised the party, from the leadership to the grassroots, to turn outwards to the country with energy, clarity of purpose and a story to tell about the future that has been missing from progressive politics for most of my adult lifetime. The 2017 manifesto, despite its flaws, was the first Labour manifesto in decades to explain not just what, but why.
As George Monbiot argues compellingly in his new book Out of the Wreckage, the strength of the neoliberal project is the clarity of its story; an overbearing state standing in the way of the enterprise and endeavour of millions of individuals. To tear it down without anything in its place is hopelessly inadequate. Now, at last, we have begun to tell a story of collective endeavour and hope, embodied for many first-time voters by Jeremy Corbyn, echoing the “Bernie Sanders effect” in the US.
But, as in the US, one great challenge for Labour remains. In its 2017 general election report, the New Economics Foundation found that Labour made its biggest strides in areas of economic growth while strikingly, after seven years of austerity, the Tories made their largest gains in areas of economic decline. It suggests that the keys to No 10 lie not in the cities where for many a sense of optimism persists and Labour is weighing in votes, but in towns across the country where people who have little hope for the future look to British politics and still find none.
That is our job now, in towns across Britain, to make hope plausible or risk seeing a significant poll lead tragically fail to translate into a parliamentary majority. Research from the Centre for Towns, a new thinktank we launched last month, found that a little over 30,000 voters living in 46 town constituencies across the country could have put Labour into power. But in those areas, despite the attraction of a Labour party that has rediscovered its ambition, too many people still believe that those ambitious plans will come at huge cost to themselves.
To turn this around will demand of us not just the courage of our convictions, but the energy, creativity, detailed work and hard choices on jobs, wages, public services, global security and climate change that proves to these voters that we can be trusted again. This weekend’s poll proves that the next election is there for the taking. But now is not the time to celebrate; now is the time to think.
• Lisa Nandy is Labour MP for Wigan
