When I was eight years old, the Labour government introduced the National Literacy Strategy, this meant daily literacy hours were mandatory for children my age. As a child who struggled with reading and writing, and was on the Special Educational Needs register until the age of 11 — I had a dedicated support staff member who gave me one-to-one tuition. Without her, I do not think I would be where I am today. When Labour left government in 2010, we had 2,400 extra teachers and 212,000 more support staff in our schools than in 1997. I was in year one in 1997. I can only imagine the impact that these policies had not only on my life but also my peers.

I was of a generation who never lived through the dark days, when the roofs of our schools were crumbling. Me and my friends did not have to experience class rooms bursting at the seams with 40 or 50 children crammed into a room. Each school I attended gained modern internet and computer technology suites during my time there — on the back of the billions of pounds spent by a Labour government. By the time I completed my GCSEs in 2008, per-pupil funding was up by 55 per cent from 1997. We had experienced all-time record levels of literacy and numeracy in our schools.

I consider myself fortunate to have grown up under a Labour government. The policies and investment that backed up the mantra: ‘Education, education, education’ offered me a chance I may not have had if born a decade earlier. I am staying in the Labour party because I want another generation to grow up under a Labour government.

I joined the Labour party while I was at university. I did so, not from naïve instinct or tribal inclination – but from a steady formulation. That the Labour party and the Labour movement is our most effective way of delivering the redistribution of wealth and power in this country. The most effective way I could deliver on my values – was with the Labour party.

No protest movement, no charity, has improved the lives of working people like the Labour party has. It is the greatest vehicle for progressive change that this country has ever known. But each of our strides forward have been achieved only when in government – when as democratic socialists, we have reached out and offered the people of this country a ‘workable strategy, not mere slogans – convincing policy, not just protest’.

It would be so much easier if everyone in this country saw the country as you and I. If so it would just be a matter of pointing out the injustices of Tory austerity (that come naturally to us) before the masses are soon ‘awakened’. Yet we know this not to be the case. We know that we face an electorate often sceptical to our values and often sceptical methods. An electorate that needs convincing – ‘that our idealism is not lunacy and our realism not mere torpor’.

And us realists know that within our past, when reaching out to make a broader appeal (which we must) – we have never compromised our values nor abandon or hid our principles. We know there is nothing principled about self-satisfaction in face of declining living standard & a growth in poverty. And we know that our principles without power are nothing but comforting to words to those hit hardest by Tory rule.

If we walk away, if we do not stay – we let those people down. We let down everybody who needs a Labour government. What is radical, as we know, is winning power and making a different.

So we have got to fight for our past to build for the future. We must let it be known that only those walled by affluence and constrained by the theoretical and abstract – can argue that a tripling of the National Health Service budget, a national minimum wage, secured maternity pay and paternity leave and the opening of 2,200 Sure Start Centres – did not improve the lives of the poorest in our society in their day to day realities.

We must let it be known that without a Labour government our country has only one alternative, and that is unending Conservative rule. Those who are about to walk away know this fact.

We must let it be known that any politics rooted in self-indulgence, perpetuated by intellectual idleness, and fuelled only by what you ‘oppose’ – will never achieve anything for the better.

It is easy to beat the hard-left on the debating room floor because behind their platitudes, lies only the outdated husk of dogma. Revel in the experience of tearing down their arguments and highlighting their hypocrisy. Find your ‘moderate’ comrades and turn up to local Labour party meetings. You just being there annoys them, and standing up and making your voice heard annoys them even more. Our arguments will prevail – the rational, reasoned case for progressive politics will prevail.

If we hold firm, organise and fight, we can have a Labour government once again and on this journey back we will bring our newer comrades with us. In moments of quiet reflection as we walk door-to-door, we must appeal to our new members to listen to the voices on the doorstep. Those voices that will tell them in frank and honest terms why they are not voting for Labour in its current state.

Soon many of them will soon see and hear our political reality — that despite their collective passion and fury at injustice, they – and the Labour party — must form a clearheaded and decisive plan towards building a broad popular appeal to win elections. Without doing that we are nothing. Over time, they will see what voting for Corbyn has left us with, and they will see the pain inflicted by Tory rule on our communities and our country. It will hurt, but we will be there to catch the crestfallen — and show them the path back to political power. It is our duty, and this is why I am staying.

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Leo Gibbons-Plowright is a Labour activist. He tweets at @Layo_GP

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Photo: Louisa Thomson