THANK YOU to the Morning Star for giving an opportunity for all four candidates in the Labour leadership election to set out their views for the future of the party, and how we approach the difficult times faced by many across Britain.

I am writing this article in a cafe in Edinburgh at the City Arts Centre adjacent to Waverley station. As ever in August, it’s buzzing with the festival and it’s raining but no-one seems to mind.

On Thursday night we had a wonderful public meeting at the University of Dundee, which was a standing-room only event, with an overflow downstairs that was connected by loudspeakers. The audience was made up of young and old — and many who had voted Yes in the referendum, who nevertheless wanted to be able to discuss their future and the future role for the Labour Party and trade unions.

Earlier in the day we had an event attended by over 300 people at the Arts Centre in Aberdeen, which is a wonderful venue, open to all, and exuding the kind of culture policy that we really need for the whole of Britain.

Yesterday we had an event in Edinburgh and a rally in Glasgow, part of a programme of meetings and rallies we’ve been holding all over Britain. The attendance at all of them is enormous. For example, a week ago in Leeds, over 2,000 people came to the armouries for an early evening rally and they were a wonderful microcosm of the whole community.

Our campaign has two watchwords — the first is policies. We have produced a number of proposals on the economy, young people, the environment and energy, housing, defence diversification and we’ve had very interesting responses, often from very thoughtful people making considered suggestions.

The second watchword is conduct. I believe politics is reduced to a puerile level of disengagement by abuse, name-calling and character assassination.

None of it advances debate, ideas or mobilises or motivates people but merely turns them off.

We do not respond to any abuse and doggedly stick to the issues that are facing the labour movement, and of course the people of the whole of Britain. To behave otherwise is to damn the democratic nature of the process we’re currently a part of.

The key issue that brought us into this campaign was the Labour Party’s failure to offer a coherent alternative to the austerity agenda imposed in 2010, resulting in huge public-sector job losses, lower wages and living standards throughout the economy and greater inequality in Britain. It is essentially a political agenda that forces the poorest to pay for the excesses of the bankers.

The Conservatives’ latest Budget showed their true colours, as if anyone needed reminding, with a fire-sale of £30 billion of state assets — almost double that which Margaret Thatcher achieved at the highest point in her privatisation mania — tax relief for the wealthiest through inheritance tax, a continued inability to collect large amounts of unpaid corporate taxation and, by slashing the DWP budget by £12bn, real hardship for some of the most desperate people in our society.

Our proposals are fundamentally that government has a strategic role in the good management of the economy to ensure that it works for all, with full employment, a realistic minimum wage at the TUC figure of £10 an hour, and we must establish a National Investment Bank to address the infrastructure in housing deficiencies all across Britain.

Such a bank would also invest in new industries to harness high-technology skills and increase high-quality manufacturing which is so underdeveloped in many parts of Britain.

We can and will create an environmentally sustainable economy that works for all and not just for the few but it cannot be done by leaving everything to the free market forces that have so disfigured the lives of so many people in post-industrial communities.

We have put forward proposals for a defence diversification agency so that the cancellation of Trident, which I support, will not be accompanied by huge job losses and skill losses. Instead, the agency will invest in good-quality engineering projects and jobs, with a portion of the money from Trident ringfenced to ensure that happens.

We need to live in a peaceful world and Labour has been damaged hugely by the Iraq vote in 2003 and the close relationship with US foreign policy.

The consequences of war continue for a long time and many of those very poor and desperate people in refugee camps all across the Middle East and some in camps in Calais are being described in appalling language, such as a “swarm,” by our Prime Minister. That is the language of inhumanity and abuse.

The issues are complicated and resolutions can only be found by starting from a humanitarian perspective. I’ve seen fellow human beings in trouble and we must do our best to help them and bring about the conditions so that others don’t suffer the same fate.

Whatever the result of this election, after September 12 there has to be debate on policy changes in the Labour Party and there has to be a much more democratic grassroots-up policy-making process, not one in which the leader dictates policy for the entire movement.

This is an unbelievably exciting time politically and not just in Britain, with similar activism and debate going on in many parts of Europe and with much excitement surrounding Bernie Sanders’s bid in the US.

It is showing that we can bring in lots of young and disengaged people into political activity as they come to understand the values of democracy and look to a future of decency, equality and real social justice. It is possible.