For the past 10 months, Labour has been skating perilously over the political equivalent of black ice. From the ‘cash for peerages’ scandal to parliamentary revolts over the education bill, the foreign prisoner release debacle and the ongoing ructions over the party’s leadership Labour has been traversing the most perilous and difficult political terrain it has faced since the heyday of Thatcherism. And it has been confronting it at just the moment that its hitherto self-destructive opponents in the Conservative party have finally managed to pull themselves together and offer a halfway credible challenge.

It is not hard to see why optimism in Labour’s ranks is in rather short supply. Against this backdrop, the upbeat prognosis about the party’s future fortunes offered by transport secretary Douglas Alexander comes as something of a surprise. Over the summer, one of the cabinet’s newest members has been pondering the challenges confronting Labour and the country over the next decade; themes which he addressed in his keynote address at Progress’ annual conference last month and in a Demos pamphlet published shortly afterwards. Unabashedly confronting the ‘big picture’ issues – globalisation, economic interdependence, security, environmental sustainability – Alexander makes a confident prediction: ‘For progressives, this is our time, it is not the time of the right.’

For the transport secretary, it is clear that the emerging politics of the next decade will be shaped by ‘economic globalisation, but also interdependence – what has been described as “economics plus” – economics plus travel, economics plus technology, economics plus communication’. In that sense, continues Alexander, ‘there are grounds for real optimism on the centre left, as we are uniquely equipped to answer the challenges of this time and this age.’

This apparent certainty stems from Alexander’s belief that the nature of those challenges can only be solved through collective endeavour. Indeed, not even the fact that many of the issues currently dominating the political agenda – such as crime, terrorism and migration – have traditionally been electorally fertile territory for the right appears to dent the transport secretary’s confidence: ‘All of the challenges … involve a key role for government. So I believe the right starts on the back foot – you can’t privatise your way out of the challenge of managed migration, the threat of terrorism, environmental degradation. I think uniquely the left recognises that government can be an expression not just of a common will but of a common task.’ Alexander’s argument is that global problems are simply too big – too global – to be solved simply by the actions of the self-interested individual so beloved of the right.

But surely Labour must concede that, for most of this year, it is the Tories who appear to have the political wind in their sails? The party has, after all, been enjoying a run of opinion poll leads not seen since the late 1980s. ‘Those who place so much faith in the polls in the Labour party,’ says Alexander, ‘forget that shared experience we had … which was that we were regularly in the lead in the 1980s and early 1990s and then lost subsequent general elections.’

The real challenge for an opposition party, believes the transport secretary, is not whether it manages to lead the government in mid-term opinion polls, but whether it manages to ‘convince sufficient people across Britain that those people would be comfortable living, in David Cameron’s case, in a Conservative Britain, or, in our case, a New Labour Britain’. It is an objective which, Alexander suggests, the Tory leader is ‘still far from achieving’. He continues: ‘I think we only managed that challenge effectively and secured that trust between 1992 and 1997. I think David Cameron rather than being a politician who has undertaken the difficult process of modernisation that we went through, is a politician determined to reposition as a marketing exercise.’

Alexander is thus dismissive of Cameron’s ‘greening’ of the Conservative party, an area which touches closely on the minister’s own portfolio. ‘In transport, we need to meet the expectations of the population and the growing economy, while meeting our environmental obligations. That involves difficult decisions which David Cameron and the Conservative party have not made,’ he argues. Indeed, as in so many areas, Alexander believes the Tories’ approach to be ‘policy-lite’. And Alexander draws a contrast with his own willingness to tackle head on some of the big challenges facing his department: ‘In my first speech as transport secretary, I made clear my determination to advance a debate about road pricing in this country.’

Drawing on the lessons of Labour’s 18 years out of office, Alexander predicts that, despite the Tories’ dreams that the next election will offer them their ‘1997 moment’, a rather more shattering prospect for the party may be in view: ‘I think it is more likely, from what we have seen of David Cameron, that it will be their 1987 moment.’ That was the year when an apparently revitalised Labour party under Neil Kinnock, running a widely praised campaign, only managed to make minor inroads into Margaret Thatcher’s huge 1983 parliamentary majority. ‘There will be better presentation [from the Tories] than perhaps in the past,’ the transport secretary goes on. ‘There will, perhaps be campaign innovations, but there will not be the confidence, the trust or the certainty on the part of the British people that the Conservatives will be looking for.’

While many in the party will find some comfort in Alexander’s parallel with 1987, others fret that the real danger for Labour rests in a repeat of the 2000 US presidential election, where an apparently moderate George W Bush managed to defeat, however dubiously, the candidate of an incumbent administration with a strong domestic and economic record. ‘I followed closely that election,’ suggests Alexander, ‘and am always mindful and never complacent about the threat the Conservatives can pose to the Labour party. But there are fundamental differences. We have a party system where … there is a great deal [more] focus on the manifesto and the policies being offered by parties than in the presidential system. And I think if people look at the subsequent development of domestic policy since 2000 in the US, it may give pause to those who think David Cameron’s so-called compassionate conservatism is the real deal.’

Alexander does not, however, advocate that Labour sits back, confident in the knowledge that the British people will not be tempted into Cameron’s political comfort zone. Instead, Labour needs to reach out to those who ‘share our values but not our vision’, translating the ‘ideals that people feel’ – often expressed through membership of individual pressure groups – into support and membership for the party. This will involve not simply upholding the ‘perhaps unfashionable idea that political parties are a vital part of how we find shared solutions to shared problems as a country’, but also ‘turning the party outwards’ to have an ‘active and sustained engagement with a range of organisations, whether concerned with local or global issues’.

Recognising that ‘too often … the experience of Labour politics can turn [people] off’, Alexander admits that his vision presents a ‘huge cultural challenge’ for the party. But he’s not about to conclude his sunny analysis of the centre-left’s future on a downbeat note: ‘I believe it’s a challenge we can and should embrace in years to come’.

Additional research by Tom Brooks Pollock and Mark Day