The nature of our failure is also one of the prime causes for hope

There have been some brilliant dissections of Labour’s defeat over the last week, particularly from Dan Jarvis, Steve Reed, and Robert Philpot.

There will be more at Progress’ annual conference today. It is vital we talk about how badly we fell short, and discuss why.

But, most importantly, our gathering at Trades Union Congress house in London is Labour’s first big chance to get together and talk about the future. The message I want us to broadcast is that Labour’s future is bright if we have the humility to listen to the public who have lost faith in us and the courage to change.

For all its shortcomings, Labour’s general election campaign got many things right.

Perhaps the most important was in exposing how poorly the Conservative-led government had served the British people over the years. The further years of painful spending reductions that the United Kingdom now faces stem directly from the Tories’ broken promise on eliminating the deficit in its first term. The A&E crisis putting patients at risk was indeed primarily caused by decisions made in Downing Street.

Conservative isolationism and incompetence abroad has diminished Britain on the global stage and been a factor in making the world less safe.

Of course, the paucity of our opponents only serves to underline how uninspiring Labour was and how badly we screwed up. We went up against a poor Conservative party that was there for the taking and ended up going backwards.

But the nature of our failure is also one of the prime causes for hope. A government that was uninspiring two weeks ago is not suddenly formidable now. The new administration has a slender majority and will rely on largely the same bunch of members of parliament whose primary loyalty remains to the hard right throwbacks who run their local Conservative associations rather than their prime minister.

Put simply, we can beat this lot in 2020, and we must. Our nation is more divided and our communities less confident after just five years of Tory government, and those most in need get far less help. We should imagine another decade of this, then swear to ourselves that we will do whatever it takes to win next time.

But to do so Labour must change so it seems in touch with people’s lives now and relevant to the future in a way that it has rarely been in recent years.

We must never again let ourselves go into an election not trusted on the fundamentals of economic management. Labour had a sensible fiscal position but constant talk about our spending priorities drowned out a critically important message on the importance of economic discipline and living within our means. In doing so we left ourselves open to the Tory charge that we were innate big spenders who had not faced up to the post-crash reality that governments here and across the world must achieve more with less. That made us toxic in the eyes of a public who understandably attached great importance to tackling the nation’s deficit.

We must also put forward a vision of the future that is both more credible but also more ambitious. I lost track of the times I was told on the doorstep that people were not sure what we stood for. When they did understand what we were about, on issues like the need to control the cost of living or stand up for the most vulnerable, they questioned whether we could deliver.

We leaked votes to all parts of the political spectrum and in nearly every part of the UK at the election, something which is vexing commentators. But the essential reason in which people turned away from us was because we seemed weak and lacking in relevance rather than because we were not leftwing or rightwing enough; or too metropolitan; or too northern; or not northern enough.

We were weak because, at root, we did not have enough to say about the basic truth of modern life: namely that the world and their country is changing at a speed that brings uncertainty and risk in at least equal measure as it seems to offer new opportunities.

People are understandably deeply concerned about the way many of their communities are changing or being left behind; their jobs seem less and less secure; and Britain’s place in the world seems ever diminished.

Our role must never again to imply we can turn back the clock or enact populist measures that people know in their hearts would fail to make a real difference to the problem. As it has at all the best moments in our history, Labour must be the party that will give people the power to thrive from the inevitable change that is impacting on their lives.

That means big decisions on education, on welfare and on our outlook abroad. It means soul -searching. And it means making the right choice in the forthcoming leadership election.

At this conference Progress members will be up for the fight and ready for the debate. Let’s get going.

John Woodcock MP is chair of Progress.