BREXIT’S impasse has become all-pervasive. It isn’t to decry the importance of the issue, however, to point out that just down the road from Labour’s Brighton conference venue in Lewes, where I live, schools being threatened with forced academisation has precious little to do with whether we stay in the EU or not. 

Nor is it to do with the EU that head teachers, wrongly in my view, have been driven to this most desperate of measures because of the chronic lack of resources all primary schools now face. 

Lewes is a small market town of 16,000 persons. Unless Brighton and Hove Albion are at home or it’s our annual bonfire, there is no permanent uniformed police presence, the police station has been closed and turned into a glorified phone box. 

It’s not the EU that reduced us to this — it’s austerity-driven politics. 

Lewes high street is becoming a commercial wasteland of empty shops. There are so many vacant properties there aren’t even enough charity shops to fill them with their wares. 

When I catch a train from here to London, I am paying to travel on one of the most expensive railways in all of Europe, and certainly the worst.  

How will being in, or out, of the EU change any of that? 

The same sorry account of a society divided every bit as much by austerity and inequality as “Leave v Remain” could be provided for countless villages, towns, suburbs and inner cities.  

And underpinning all our futures, climate change. Just imagine for a moment if all the days, weeks, months and years Parliament has been debating Brexit had been spent finding the answers to solve that. 

We can vote to leave or remain in the EU but there’s no exit from a dead planet.

To effect a political shift from the Brexit impasse requires, as journalist Gary Younge has put it, “not to mock, but to tell a better story. One that includes them, has a better future for all of us and, ultimately turns ‘them’ and ‘us’ into ‘we.’” 

A politics born out of the Popular Front that many readers of the Morning Star, whatever our differing positions on the EU, will be familiar with. 
 
For such a “we” to emerge in the short time we might have before a general election demands a politics from Labour that doesn’t simply seek to reproduce the much-lauded 2017 general election manifesto For the Many Not the Few.

However good this was it didn’t win the last general election and it most certainly won’t win us the next one either. 

The beginnings of a new agenda for change are there, yet have been entirely submerged by all things Brexit.  

To break through we need a practical vision of the state as the provider and defender of the public good.  

We need to anchor our understanding that life chances are determined by the scales of inequality. And we need a bold break with an economic model that is accelerating towards an unmanageable environmental crisis, putting in its place a sustainable economic strategy. 

That break is the green new deal. 

This will be a key debate, not only on the fringes of conference this week at The World Transformed Festival and elsewhere, but also on the conference floor itself, where it will almost certainly become a central plank of Labour’s general election message. 

But this requires another “we” in place of “them versus us” because the party’s credibility to deliver any such deal is hopelessly compromised by those Labour MPs who support Heathrow and other airports’ expansion, the Labour council leaders clamouring for HS2 to go ahead, affiliated trade unions in favour of fracking, a party policy that remains in favour of nuclear power and reopening coalmines. 

Neither our relationship with one continent nor with the entire planet will be settled by parliamentary manoeuvre, nor this or that deal, but an almighty break with the existing political consensus founded on a new popular majority and common sense. 

When the general election comes this will be a vote that threatens to break one consensus, neoliberalism, and shape a new one every much as bold as Attlee’s spirit of ’45. 

We are facing an environmental catastrophe requiring solutions every bit as radical, and then some, as winning the peace after a world war.

We stand on the verge of momentous change. It’s both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. 

Along the coast from Brighton is Hastings and Rye, number seven on the list of 66 constituencies that Labour must win at the next general election to form a government in its own. 

Half an hour away up the A23 is Crawley, number 45 on the same list, a little over halfway towards the magic 66. 

Travel westwards from Brighton along the coast to East Worthing and Shoreham. Thanks to the extraordinary breakthrough there since 2017 that has taken Labour from zero councillors for over four decades to 10, now this is a realistic Labour seat could win too. 

Hastings has had its fair share of making history — 1066 and all that — but Worthing? Worthing! 

These seats, our first stage towards a society where foodbanks aren’t needed any more and climate change isn’t what we have to protest against but something society is actively reversing. 

Not me, them versus us, but me, them, and us becoming “we.” This is what I mean by a Corbynism from below. Not the parliamentary arithmetic of the past year or more but the remaking of the entire body politic. 

To create a socialism of the self that becomes a socialism of our selves — and in the process shapes a new, popular consensus.

To win votes, sure, but this time, to transform Britain together, for good, forever. It’s our moment, time to make some history. 

Mark Perryman is editor of Corbynism from Below, published by Lawrence & Wishart.