Labour needs to convince Yorkshire that it will deliver for the region - Andrew Vine

There’s a touch of the evangelical about the terminology of this, which is fine, but there needs to be much more on offer than lofty ambition and vague outlines of policy when the announcement is made on Thursday.

We need a degree of detail about what Sir Keir proposes to do about key issues facing Yorkshire, among them transport, educational under-achievement and the development of a thriving green industrial sector.

These are all of immediate concern, part of a wider picture of a north that has been short-changed for too long and denied the help to grow economic prosperity, create new jobs and give our young people the opportunities they deserve.

If the voters of the red wall seats are to be won back by Labour, they need to know that the party understands their concerns and frustrations at years of broken promises by the Government, particularly over levelling-up, and is going to do something about it.

That means a commitment to investing in transformative change on projects like high-speed rail links across the Pennines and addressing the deprivation and inequalities that are holding so many children back.

It must also mean finally taking action to close the north-south divide in investment and doing away with the lottery of funding for major projects, which in the past months has seen equally deserving areas of Yorkshire competing against each other for money, with more losing out than getting help.

These are all big asks of Labour, especially given the state of the economy. If he wins power next year, Sir Keir is going to inherit extremely tight public finances, which will limit his room for manoeuvre.

Nevertheless, if the north is to put its faith in Labour to address the drift and disappointments of the past few years, Sir Keir must do more than promise improvements at some unspecified point in the future.

So far, the Labour leader has been given an open goal by the Government, and he’s taken full advantage of it.

The scandals of the Boris Johnson years and the debacle of Liz Truss’s brief and disastrous premiership have been gifts to Sir Keir, and his attacks on the unfitness for office of both have been accurate and forensic.

But highlighting the failures of the Government can only take Labour so far, and that point has now been reached because Rishi Sunak is a far more responsible Premier than either of his two immediate predecessors and has restored probity to the business of running the country.

And even though opinion polls consistently giving Labour a 20-point lead over the Conservatives point towards the electorate having made up its mind that it is time for a change when the next election comes, Sir Keir can no longer rely on the Government’s knack for digging itself into a hole putting him into office.

He needs to spell out how life would be better under Labour, and show much more appreciation of the north’s justified claims for a better deal. He can still appear to be a distant figure more in tune with the preoccupations of London than the challenges faced by former industrial towns seeking new directions after the decline of traditional industries.

Though he has work to do in changing that perception of him, Sir Keir last week showed an understanding of mainstream northern voter opinion by bluntly telling the hard-left of his party to fall in line with his policies or get out, and by barring his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, from standing again for Labour.

The loss of the red wall seats at the last election – and Labour’s worst defeat since the mid-1930s – were proof that voters in Yorkshire and the wider north reject a hard-left agenda from Labour.

Those in his own party who sneer at Sir Keir for being a leader who seeks to emulate Tony Blair are actually paying him a compliment.

He understands what some Labour MPs and supporters inexplicably seem unable to fathom – that their party’s most electorally-successful leader won and kept power by appealing to mainstream voters with middle-of-the-road views.

Then as now, voters in Yorkshire constituencies don’t want red-in-tooth-and-claw socialism.