As polling day approaches, political debate always seems to get more emotional, more tub-thumping, more heartfelt. For the cynic, it is the last desperate roll of the dice from politicians, a final flurry of crocodile tears to entice a public that badly wants to believe in something. The reality is almost the exact opposite. In most elections, it is the public that are rational and the politicians that have to struggle to keep their emotions in check, knowing that Britain is a country where people lose elections because they are too sentimental, not insufficiently so. The early salvos of a campaign, dominated by disputes over facts and figures, represent the suppression of feelings by politicians in order to persuade a sceptical public; the final stages are emotional because there is no persuasion left to do.

Political activism is a minority pursuit and politicians are true believers in a nation of sceptics. To the extent that the public has ‘feelings’ about politics, they are normally those that are injected into the bloodstream by politicians. This only works over the long term, the slow stirring of latent ingredients, the creeping damp of an idea. Despite the effort, public emotion normally remains a diluted form of the original Kool-Aid. Labour voters do not feel the zeal for social justice that Labour members of parliament do just as nobody hates Europe as much as Nigel Farage does.

But sometimes a fuse catches, a dam bursts. Eurosceptic politicians have been stirring the emotional pot of Britain for decades, slowly simmering a broth of grievance that is now boiling over. Just like in a pub or a football stadium, it only takes a small group of very angry people to change the mood of political debate in a country. We are seeing where that get us, somewhere ugly, somewhere snarling.

Hate and resentment, fear and suspicion, they have all crept into our politics in recent years. This week the focus is on the far-right and its repugnant strain of xenophobia and loathing, but on the left we must not get complacent. The language of treachery and ‘take our country back’ bombast echoes some of the uglier bits of the debate in supposedly leftie Scotland in 2014. Meanwhile, in Labour we have bred a hatred of the Tories that often goes way beyond robust debate. Hissing at journalists for doing their jobs, calling Tory ministers ‘witches’ and being just as cruel to each other. That quote from NHS founder Aneurin Bevan about Tories being ‘lower than vermin’ should make us cringe with shame; instead we put it on T-shirts.

The belief of some on the left that we are immune to these ugly political emotions is one of our least attractive qualities. Jeremy Corbyn’s words this week are a perfect showcase, so brilliant at diagnosing and taking on far-right hatred, but in the next breath telling the public to ‘turn their anger on the Tories’ without a shred of irony of self-reflection. We can be better than this. Better than a simplistic good people/bad people divide that sees voters of other parties as morally deficient or misguided. Anger and fear in our public debate will always be inhibitors to electing a Labour government, never enablers of it.

If this self-criticism is harsh, it is also necessary. On Thursday half the country will vote for something that many on the left have been decrying as either a sign of latent racism, or incomprehensible stupidity. Many of them will be Labour voters. How we approach these people is probably the single biggest challenge facing our party in the coming decade. If the Labour party treats these voters like it often treats Tory voters, with a mix of scorn and condescension, then the party faces losing a huge chunk of its core vote. It has to be possible to condemn those who spread hate, the United Kingdom Independence party and all the other two-penny reactionaries dressed as revolutionaries, without tarring Leave voters with the same brush. Redirecting their anger may paper over cracks for a few years, but will leave the foundations untouched.

We must understand that for many people and many places in the UK, globalisation has not felt like a positive force. They are voting for change to a status quo that leaves them behind while more metropolitan areas reap the rewards and dish out the sermons on the aggregate benefits, oblivious to how that sounds to people who do not share in them. This place-based inequality of globalisation should be a leftwing issue. Finding a way for towns in the north, the Midlands and in Wales to share the fruits of international cooperation is difficult, but it is essential if Labour is to win the case for an open economies, open borders and open societies. This is especially true if Thursday does turn out to be the day of the Remains and millions of Labour voters are left feeling deflated.

It comes back to emotion. Campaigns based on emotional appeal might not win general elections, but in the long term emotion does matter in politics. You cannot grow a centre-left government in soil fertilised with resentment and despair. Leftwing politics, at its best, has to build on emotions of togetherness, hope and love. The Labour party has been at its best this week. We have come together, cared for each other and put our values front and centre. For many of us it has felt like using a muscle again after a long time, painful but also empowering. Let’s not let that muscle wither again. We should never lose sight of the hard-headedness required to win elections, nor can we let morality-based politics become moralising politics. But if we can put a little more hope and a little less anger back into our politics then we will be doing our party and our country a great service.

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Tom Railton is a member of Progress. He tweets @TomRailton1