Throughout the dreadful Thatcher years we had a poster in our house called ‘What Does Labor Want?’ The answer was a quote from Samuel Gompers of the American AFL/CIO trade union confederation written in 1893: ‘We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals, more learning and less vice; more constant work and less crime, more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact more opportunities to cultivate our better natures.’ Prehistoric Labour, perhaps, but no less powerful for its values and sense of purpose. They should still be central to Labour today.

The aim of Labour’s progressive politics is to build a fairer, more equal society which improves the lives of millions of people in this country and elsewhere. And it’s this group who were the greatest losers from Labour’s disastrous defeat last Thursday. They are now vulnerable to Conservative values, Conservative practices and Conservative people, including those who have disguised their reactionary ideology under flaxen hair and unthreatening buffoonery.

Ahead of every other consideration, Labour’s all-consuming priority must be to ensure that we do not repeat this defeat at the 2010 general election.

Last Thursday’s Conservative success was the direct result of Labour failure, as the prime minister has acknowledged. And the massive response to abolition of the 10p rate demonstrated that politics matters: the decision affected millions of people and reverberated at the polls. The decisions of different political parties, based on differing values, do change people’s lives for better or for worse.

Those of us who were around in 1979 will remember the widespread views, including on the left, that Mrs Thatcher couldn’t last for long, that Labour would gain from a period out of office to refresh and regroup, and that the country would benefit from a brief change.

They will also recall, as I do, the very long journey back to power with multiple divisions, bitter disputes and recurring disappointments as, under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair, Labour gradually worked its way from the margins to the centre of British politics. Good leadership matters as those years attest!

We succeeded because we faced up to our failures, tackled our weaknesses and retained our unity, steadfast in seeking electoral victory. And that’s what we have to do now, starting by understanding the nature of Thursday’s vote.

It was a slap in the face from an electorate which mostly wants us to succeed but believes that we have stumbled. It was not a rejection of Labour and all that we have achieved in the last 11 years, and so our job is to regain their confidence. They have the right to expect better.

That can only be done by conducting our politics differently, establishing our long-term strategy and eliminating short-term errors. So, first, we have to change the conduct of our politics. We should discard the techniques of ‘triangulation’, and ‘dividing lines’ with the Conservatives, which lead to the not entirely unjustified charge that we simply follow proposals from the Conservatives or the right-wing media, to minimise differences and remove lines of attack against us. We should finish with ‘dog whistle’ language, such as ‘British jobs for British workers’, which flatter some of the most chauvinistic and backward-looking parts of British society. We should suspend the black arts of divisive inner-party briefing and bullying which penalise and inhibit debate and discussion about the future.

Instead we need to be authentic, frank and direct as we answer questions and explain what we are doing; we should respect politics and elected politicians with proper transparent funding arrangements and accountability for what we do; and we should govern openly and confidently on the basis of a programme which properly expresses Labour’s values and beliefs.

Second we should follow the prime minister’s advice and focus upon the long-term issues which will enable our country to succeed in an increasingly challenging modern world. Immediately before the 2005 general election I proposed to Tony Blair a long-term strategy which I thought Labour needed to follow after the successes of our first two terms. I wish that he had decided then that our goals should be to:-

• Establish a radical, holistic commitment to sustainable transport and energy. Piecemeal initiatives are not enough;

• increase both public and private investment in effective, fair and locally accountable public services;

• relate taxation and charging more closely to expenditure, and reduce our profligate and bureacracy-promoting public administration;

• secure a stable constitutional settlement across the UK, by completing our reforms;

• strengthen public confidence in the criminal justice system;

• reinforce the UK’s relationship with the European Union to improve the EU’s capacity to act on the environment and security. Working together EU countries should be more effective in areas such as the Western Balkans and the Middle East, leaving less reason for major United States engagement.

I believe that the British people would support such a framework for forward-looking and progressive government.

Third, we have to address the short-term errors which week-by-week erode confidence in Labour’s competence and capacity:-

• The prime minister’s pledge to solve the problems arising from abolition of the 10p tax rate must be fulfilled in detail and soon. The subject will resonate until there is clarity. There may now be a case for an early mini-Budget to establish a clear sense of economic direction and strengthen economic confidence.

• We should abandon proposals to increase the period of pre-charge detention to 42 days. This Parliament settled the matter in March 2006 at 28 days and, though I will support the government’s proposals, I believe that it would be best not to consider them again during this Parliament.

• Patricia Hollis has put forward progressive proposals on women’s pensions which are supported by the House of Lords. The government should accept them. Its current opposition will lead to defeat later this summer.

• The government should suspend the current over-bureaucratic review of post offices in order to consider properly the Postal Services Commission’s proposals to give the Post Office PLC greater commercial freedom and allow subpostmasters to expand and develop their services.

• The Labour party has to end the historically unprecedented situation where we have not had a general secretary for over six months. The party’s organisation and finances are now dangerously weak and need emergency attention.

We do not have much time to reverse the damaging shifts in opinion against Labour which we have seen both in opinion polls and in last Thursday’s elections.

We must robustly reject those who say that defeat in 2010 is inevitable. Such people – often relatively comfortable themselves – have no right to condemn whole communities to a decade or more of Conservatism. However their predictions could come true if Labour does not clearly resolve its direction and approach well before this year’s party conferences. Everyone in the Labour party and outside will be constantly alert to progress we are making in this respect.

We should start immediately by winning the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. Some seem to have accepted defeat already but I think that we can most certainly hold the seat if we communicate a clear and attractive sense of political purpose.