We are three months on from our worst electoral defeat in Scotland since 1918, and our worst defeat in England and Wales since 1987, but the clock is already ticking towards huge electoral contests in Scotland, London and Wales next year, and the next general election in May 2020. The scale of the reversal on 7 May means we start further behind in our target seats than we did five years ago, and with likely boundary changes in a reshaped 600-seat House of Commons in 2020, will require 81 gains to form a majority government. Like all defeated MPs and hopeful candidates, I have been through what are described as the five stages of grief over our collective loss and what it means for the people our movement exists for and serves: denial and isolation; anger; bargaining; depression; and finally acceptance. As we begin to cast what could be the most important votes in our movement’s history, that emotional journey of the last 12 weeks needs to be allied to analysing what the voters were telling us this May when they rejected us and supported other parties. At heart, we need to decide whether we are content to be a pressure group protesting from the outside, or a force to change our country from the inside – in government.

In Glasgow North-east we suffered the largest swing against Labour in British electoral history at just under 40 per cent, with the largest movement of voters to the Scottish National party being in the working-class communities which had for decades been our most loyal backers, giving me a victory in a crucial by-election in the eye of the expenses storm in 2009. Our campaign team had worked diligently to increase our voter contact rate to 58 per cent given an expanded electorate as a result of increased registration for the Scottish referendum, campaigned hard for a living wage locally, secured victories in both Holyrood constituencies within the seat during the previous low point for Scottish Labour in 2011, won the local and European elections in our area in 2012 and 2014, only to be swept away on 7 May. Throughout the central belt of Scotland, a similar story can be told.

One theory for our defeat in Scotland is that we lost because we were insufficiently committed to ending austerity, and failed to offer policies insulated from any public spending cuts. My experience and the recent British Electoral Study disprove that theory. Our plan on public spending from 2015-20 was in fact less austere overall than that of the SNP and would have cut the deficit more quickly. Voters were telling us they did not trust us with their money and the public finances, were sceptical about our competence in delivering change, and wanted a positive story of national purpose and recovery from stronger leadership. Above all they wanted a Labour party that looked fit to govern, could inspire hope, and was strong enough to win so that their families, friends and community could have a better life.

In Scotland, the referendum accelerated the process of the emotional detachment between Scottish working-class voters and Labour (the middle classes having begun to move over to the SNP from 2007). Voters who once readily found an identity in United Kingdom-wide social democracy were often the most zealous converts to civic nationalism. In the SNP, we face opponents with an enviably large electoral tent, but under Kezia Dugdale’s leadership we can counter the essential contradiction of a party which governs from the centre at Holyrood, but uses anti-austerity rhetoric at Westminster, while being a major barrier to the election of a Labour government. But the notion that we can defeat the SNP and gain Scottish seats at the next UK general election by veering markedly to the SNP’s left is nonsense. SNP members of parliament have already given the game away that their tactics will pivot from labelling us as ‘Red Tories’ to Labour being unelectable in England and therefore still unworthy of support in Scotland, should that sharp lurch to the left occur.

Elections in Scotland and across Britain are won by broadening our appeal across working-class and middle-class voters – it used to just be the Tories whose electoral success reminded us of that, now we have the SNP’s example to study too. Current polls imply a further swing from Labour to the Conservatives of 2.3 per cent since the general election, which on a uniform swing would win them a further 15 Labour seats were there to be an election today. Fifty Labour seats would fall to the Tories if they were able to secure a swing of six per cent in 2020, if they matched their Thatcher-Major vote shares of 42-43 per cent and Labour’s vote fell to 25-26 per cent – even worse than 1983. Both Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP and David Cameron’s Conservatives embody the principle that successful oppositions run to the centre-ground – the prize of victory is that in government you get to shape the centre-ground.

Given the scale of the electoral mountain we face to win again, fighting to gain seats in Scotland is a non-negotiable element of our electoral strategy for 2020. But four in five of the votes we need to win to form a Labour government then are those of Conservative voters in England and Wales. Only a credible, radical, and electable leader, a message of hope, and agenda for government can produce the necessary Labour gains from Gower to East Lothian to Watford – and a strategy focused on achieving 40 per cent of the vote across Britain. When I campaigned in the last parliament in by-elections in Corby, Eastleigh and Heywood and Middleton, my overwhelming impression was their similarity to voters in Scotland – they want credibility from Labour on the public finances, education reform, and a sense that all of society can share in the better life that a growing economy ought to provide.

But hope is built on solid foundations of jobs, security and confidence in our place in the world. Harming the independence of the Bank of England by running a looser monetary policy and printing more cash for expenditure purposes when productivity and living standards rather than demand are now the pre-eminent economic challenges we face is the wrong priority, the inflationary priority, and will damage our credibility. Setting our face against collective defence through Nato in a world where Russia is prepared to use hard power will damage our nation’s security. Adopting an equivocal or hostile stance to our engagement with the European Union would be a betrayal of both our history and our destiny, and create barriers to growth, trade and jobs.

To serve in government is to offer the fullest expression of our values for our society. While we agonise about who we are, the Tories are busy reshaping the state, and dominating the centre-ground where elections are won. To serve we need to win. To win we need to broaden our support, not diminish it by running away from where the electorate are. When Labour progresses electorally, the ordinary working people our movement was founded by move forward too. When we cast our votes this week, we must think of them – the lone parents working to support their children, the young person in need of a college place or an apprenticeship, the small business-owner looking to expand her firm, the family preparing to move to a bigger home with their new baby. I will be giving Liz Kendall my first preference vote as leader, and with my other preferences I will keep those millions of people firmly in mind – they need a credible, socially just Labour government in 2020, not in a generation’s time.

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William Bain is former member of parliament for Glasgow North-east. He tweets @William_Bain