On Thursday, voters will have a historic opportunity, not just decisively to evict one of the worst governments this country has ever endured. They will have the chance to replace it with something altogether different: a Labour administration characterised by integrity and a respect for public office, an understanding of ordinary people’s lives, and an honest desire to make Britain a fairer and greener place. Such simple ingredients, but ones that have been missing in action for the past 14 years, to the detriment of us all.

Only three Labour leaders have won majorities in the past 100 years. If the polls are proved right, Keir Starmer looks set to become the fourth, an extraordinary feat just five years after his party suffered its worst electoral defeat since the 1930s. Voters should seize this chance to inflict a heavy electoral loss on the Conservatives for their ruinous period in office, and positively endorse the alternative future that the Labour party offers.

A global financial meltdown; a pandemic; then an energy crisis: the last 15 years have been characterised by a series of painful external shocks. But every Conservative prime minister since 2010 has acted to make things immeasurably worse. First came the austerity years. David Cameron and George Osborne used the cover of the financial crisis for their ideological pursuit of a thinner welfare state: the chronic underfunding of the NHS, the cutting of financial support for low-paid parents in order to pay for tax cuts disproportionately benefiting the better off, and the erosion of services for vulnerable adults and children. The excruciating results are evident today, from the record numbers of people waiting for NHS diagnosis and treatment to rising levels of child poverty and rough sleeping.

The financial crisis should have been the wake-up call that prompted politicians to recognise the structural economic issues facing Britain: low levels of business investment, sluggish productivity growth, and some of the highest regional inequalities of any wealthy nation. Instead, the right flank of the Conservative party, led by an opportunistic Boris Johnson, promised the country that leaving the European Union would magically solve all our economic woes and transform an........

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