Jon Trickett: Labour must grasp the change the country demands

Without being seen to look backward to old Labour formulae, we can – and should – put an end to the years of triangulation against the Tories. We must cease to be the party of the establishment, and become the party of an insurgency against those powerful vested interests which have so damaged the country.

The collapse of the financial markets has increased both a sense of insecurity about the future and a feeling that the growing inequalities in our country – exemplified by the bankers' bonuses – are unfair.

The times we live in demand an active government; an end to the idea that markets are always right; enhanced social protections for the millions who feel vulnerable at a time of economic change; a rebalanced and reflationary economic strategy; and a socially just tax system.

These requirements cannot be fulfilled by a government of the Right. They require a Labour Party which quickly regains its confidence in our historic values.

There is a political crisis, too. An enormous gulf has opened up between the governed and the Westminster elite. Every week, I attended Labour's Cabinet and worked as Gordon Brown's Parliamentary Private Secretary. But every week, too, I attended my surgeries and spoke to friends and family in Yorkshire. The disjunction between the two experiences was evident and during the election, in hundreds of encounters with voters, I could sense their growing disillusionment. Of course, this was crystallised by the horrific expenses fiasco. But the roots of this crisis lay deeper.

The country was shocked to see a war approved by the Commons fought on a false prospectus offered by a Labour prime minister. And millions of people were profoundly uneasy at the way in which the European Union's free market culture, based on the free movement of capital and labour, was intensified and steamrollered through the Commons in the form of the Lisbon Treaty.

Britons continue to feel that the criminal justice system still needs recalibrating in favour of the victim. Nonetheless, aspects of Labour's excellent anti-crime drive – which has yielded falling crime levels – had authoritarian tinges and gave the impression of an over-mighty state.

Labour needs to rebuild its relationship with its core demographic alliance of progressive and working-class voters. Our social base in both these groups has atrophied. Between 1997 and 2005, and under Tony Blair, Labour lost four million votes. In this month's election, we lost a further 900,000, almost exclusively manual workers.

We can, therefore, only rebuild ourselves if we move beyond New Labour in three areas. First, our next leader must offer a new economic paradigm – the creation of a more heterogeneous base built around green industries rather than our over-dependence on the City. We should espouse a clearly redistributive tax and welfare system. Serious steps need to be taken to offer social protections to people at work.

Second, we need to reassert the importance of public spending to achieve growth. The former chancellor's suggestion that Labour's cuts would go deeper than those carried out by Margaret Thatcher rocked the confidence of millions of people.

Finally, in order to resolve the political crisis, we should place ourselves decisively on the side of the governed and not be part of the elite. We need to return to our tradition of being for civil liberties and opposed to the authoritarian state. We need to embrace political and institutional reform. It will also mean that our new leader must say that the war in Iraq was wrong and that the mistake will never again be repeated by Labour. The new Government is not as stable as it claims. Labour, therefore, has no time to lose. We must have a debate which will be suffused with a deep pride at our achievements in office. But with the benefit of my recent experience, I give a strong warning to the Labour movement.

We must choose a leader who can learn from our mistakes and apply those lessons to the future. It would be best not to choose someone who was a minister at the time the decision was taken to go to war. We must reject any continuity candidate and grasp the change the country wants, but which will not be delivered by the present Cabinet.

This task is urgent. On behalf of the people Labour exists first and foremost to represent, we can't afford to get it wrong.

Jon Trickett is the Labour MP for Hemsworth. He was Gordon Brown's Parliamentary Private Secretary.