LABOUR is in trouble. Barely over a year into government, our polling has slumped to around 20 per cent. Reform UK regularly leads, eating into Conservative votes while Labour supporters drift to the Lib Dems, Greens, smaller parties — or give up altogether.

And it’s easy to see why.

The Conservatives’ austerity measures have left local authorities and public services on their knees. Social security is threadbare. Pay has been held down for years. Rents are soaring and mortgages for many are unaffordable. Childcare is out of reach. Food inflation is still rising.

People were never enthusiastic — they were desperate. Desperate for change. That is a fragile foundation for government. Changes to living standards must be tangible, and they must be urgent.

Angela Rayner’s resignation has triggered a deputy leadership contest. But the real question facing Labour is deeper than personalities: what is Labour for? What kind of country do we want to build?

Labour has become too centrist, too managerial, too uninspiring. The Conservatives, struggling to reorganise after defeat, are drifting further right. Reform UK meanwhile offers empty slogans that sound like answers. Labour has too often followed their script instead of setting its own agenda.

That cedes ground to Nigel Farage while distracting from the real crises shaping people’s lives: stagnant pay, unaffordable homes, insecure jobs and gutted public services. Demonising migrants solves nothing and dehumanises the vulnerable.

Labour’s task is to tackle the inequalities and public service failures that define everyday life.

Reform UK’s rhetoric won’t raise a nurse’s wage or build a single council home. And if Labour echoes them, people will rightly ask: what is the point of Labour?

Our focus should be on the realities of everyday life: insecure employment, childcare costs, overstretched schools and hospitals, broken transport and unaffordable housing.

This government has taken some steps — public-sector pay settlements, the Employment Rights Bill, the Renters’ Rights Bill, a pledge on housing, and the Rail Passenger Ownership Bill. These are welcome, but modest against the scale of rebuilding needed after 14 years of Conservative austerity.

In my own constituency, Middlesbrough and Thornaby East, where there are so many positives, with, among other things, our magnificent award-winning Teesside University and our burgeoning tech and digital sector, sadly, poverty levels remain horribly high.

Families wait months for temporary accommodation. Our new secondary school took eight years to arrive. Our health services are under-resourced. Railways remain unelectrified two centuries after they were born in our region. Buses fail to get people where they need to go.

This is not just Middlesbrough’s story — it is Britain’s. A country where local hardship is magnified by a national system that lets private companies siphon wealth out of essential services instead of reinvesting in them.

Labour must lift its sights and be transformative. The restoration of passenger rail to public ownership is welcome, but it is only a start.

For decades, billions have been handed out in dividends by privatised transport, energy and water companies while services decline and costs rise. That money should have gone into better trains, cheaper bills and cleaner water — not shareholders’ pockets.

That is why it is encouraging to see figures like Andy Burnham talk about “retaking control of essentials to reduce living costs.” These are the kinds of bold steps we need.

By contrast, tinkering with old Conservative schemes or renewing unpopular New Labour ideas — like reviving failed hospital league tables — only replays a broken record of waste and profit-driven delivery.

Labour must confront inequality with seriousness. Today, 50 families hold as much wealth as the poorest half of Britain. That is not inevitable — it is the outcome of political choices. Fair taxation of that extreme wealth could fund services for the many. And our child poverty strategy must scrap the two-child limit.

This wealth divide also explains why our services are in such disrepair. Decades of outsourcing and privatisation have created a system designed to funnel money upwards, leaving front-line services underfunded and overstretched. Labour should end this failed experiment, bring services back into public hands and rebuild them for people, not profit.

And we must deliver a new wave of council housing — not just “affordable” housing, but secure, publicly owned homes. We cannot repeat the mistake of relying on private finance initiatives that leave us indebted while corporations extract profit. Councils must be empowered and funded to build again.

On the world stage, Britain needs moral clarity. If regimes bomb hospitals or murder aid workers, we should not arm them, excuse them, or trade with them. We should use every tool available to stop violence and save lives. That is not radical — it is the bare minimum people expect from a country that claims to stand for values.

This is what Labour was elected to do: make life fairer, more secure and more hopeful. We will not achieve it by imitating the right or recycling the playbook of the 2000s. People are tired of tinkering at the edges. They want change they can feel — in wages, homes, services and communities.

Conference should be a wake-up call. If Labour ducks the hard choices, it risks irrelevance. But if it is bold, if it sets the agenda rather than follows it, this decade can be transformative for Britain.

The choice is ours. The time to choose is now.

Andy McDonald is MP for Middlesbrough and Thornaby.