On the surface things look good for Labour but the party has done too little to prepare for a 2015 victory

Two years to go until the general election and the Labour party is nicely ahead in the opinion polls. Its candidates are winning by-elections with big swings against the government. In municipal elections, Labour is sweeping all before it. Inside the party, the grumblings about leadership are all but over. Apart from a few ‘ultras’, the leader’s position is secured with the right and soft-left in the party and unions. The bookies are tipping a Labour win. The party is all set to deliver the country from a government of privatisation, cuts to public services and social division.

Twenty-three years ago, this description perfectly fitted the Labour party under Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley. Then, as now, the party felt like it was on the slipway to an election which at the very least would deliver a hung parliament, if not an outright majority. In March 1989, just two years after a thumping in the general election, Labour nosed ahead of the Tories in the opinion polls, hitting the magic 40 per cent for the first time in the decade.

In February 1989 Labour won the Vale of Glamorgan by-election on a 12.4 per cent swing. The Tories lost a seat they had held since 1951. In the May county council elections Labour won hundreds of seats, and took control of Humberside, Northumberland, Lancashire and Clwyd. In the European elections Labour overtook the Tories for the first time in a national election since 1974, gaining 13 seats. Labour spokespeople such as Gerald Kaufman and Bryan Gould toured the TV studios barely able to contain their glee. By October 1989 all the polls put Labour above 40 per cent, with some leads of nine points. Kinnock’s personal ratings improved, putting him ahead of Margaret Thatcher. At the end of the year, the Times put him forward as its politician of the year. The following spring, Labour won the Mid-Staffordshire by-election, turning a 14,000 Tory majority into a 9,000 Labour one.

Everyone knows what happened next. Labour’s defeat in 1992 was down to a complex web of factors. To blame the Sun and the Mail, Kinnock’s personality, the Tories’ defenestration of Thatcher, or even the Sheffield rally, is too simple, too easy. Labour lost in 1992 because of many reasons, not one. But threaded through the voters’ own justification for not voting Labour – past disunity and extremism, the unions, the ‘tax bombshell’, defence – was the question of trust. As the opinion polls pointed to a Labour victory, and the Tory press ripped into Kinnock, so those wavering or doubtful about Labour became more anxious. They did not trust Labour. Fear won over hope.

So here we are again. The greatest threat to the Labour party in 2013 is complacency. Labour will do well in the county elections in May. The Tories control all but one of the English county councils; they will not after May. In Doncaster and North Tyneside the mayoralties are up for grabs, although Labour’s chances of success here are less certain. There will be parliamentary by-elections in which Labour will take seats, or secure them, with impressive swings against the government. The 10-point leads will continue, or even extend. In June 1990, Labour took a 15-point lead over the Tories. In 2013 or 2014, Ed Miliband might repeat Kinnock’s success.

There will be mighty protests against cuts to public services or welfare reform. In 1989 and 1990, tens of thousands took to the streets to protest against the poll tax, culminating in a full-scale riot in Trafalgar Square with over 300 arrests and burning buildings. Even Stringfellows was attacked.

All of this history repeating itself should be a cause of alarm, not smugness. You can feel a sense of inevitability creeping into the party, that victory will come because it ought to. It is exactly what the party went through in 1989-90. It anaesthetises any desire to reach out to new voters. Miliband is surrounded by people dreaming of their return to Downing Street, or planning their first moments behind ministerial desks or seated on the Treasury bench.  On a range of issues, notably welfare and public service reform, Labour has fallen in with the unions or pressure groups to oppose everything the government is doing. Labour MPs tramp the streets with the latest demo, speak at rallies, make passionate speeches at conference. It is not enough. Labour was so hated, so reviled by the election in 2010, that the damage will take more than a few speeches to repair. Kinnock gave good party conference speeches too.

On the central question of the economy Labour is still not trusted. On the vortex issues of immigration, the benefits culture, antisocial behaviour and crime, Labour has nothing much to say. Labour might still win in 2015, on some fluke of the electoral system, or a UK Independence party surge, or a collapse in the coalition. But, without a thoroughgoing programme of modernisation of every aspect of British life, winning and governing well are two very different matters.