Veteran Labour MP Dennis Skinner’s inspiring call for Labour to mount an ambitious left-wing campaign for electoral victory rings true.

Too much has been made of war criminal Tony Blair’s supposed wisdom when it comes to winning elections, since he did lead Labour to electoral victory three times.

But Mr Skinner is right to highlight the circumstances of Mr Blair’s victories. The 1997 landslide had more to do with widespread discontent after 18 years of Conservative rule than with the so-called “third way.”

Mr Blair, along with most of the Establishment, points to Labour losses in the 1980s and victory in the 1990s and 2000s as evidence that people will always reject socialism at the ballot box.

But the labour movement in the 1980s was crippled by the treachery of the “gang of four” who deserted Labour to form the Social Democrats, now subsumed into the Liberal Democrats. The SDP-Liberal alliance took 25 per cent of the vote in 1983, just behind Labour and ensuring Margaret Thatcher was returned to office despite being opposed by a majority of the electorate.

Similarly, the idea that Labour won in 1997 because of Blair’s lurch to the right does not stand up to scrutiny. Labour’s manifesto was more left-wing than new Labour dinosaurs care to remember — the party was committed to establishing a minimum wage, devolving power to Scotland and Wales and reintroducing free entry to national museums, for example.

It also pledged to renationalise the railways and not to introduce tuition fees for university students. The fact that in power those promises were broken does not detract from the fact that they attracted votes in 1997.

In any case the context of this year’s election is dramatically different from that of the late 1990s. The 2008 economic crash illustrated the bankruptcy of neoliberal economics and the fallacy of Gordon Brown’s infamous “no more boom and bust” rhetoric.

On issue after issue the public are miles to the left of the main parliamentary parties. Huge majorities support taking the railways and energy companies back into public ownership.

Polls show most British people are opposed to maintaining our colossally expensive and morally indefensible nuclear weapons, are hostile to the Establishment’s endless thirst for foreign wars and want real action to meet the threat of climate chaos.

The Conservatives’ “all in it together” mantra is the subject of public ridicule and most of us are in favour of higher taxes on the rich and clamping down on the crazy casino capitalism of the big banks.

All this means Labour should be poised to take Downing Street in a walk next May. The only reason it is not is confusion as to what the party stands for.

Dispiriting nonsense from Ed Balls about sticking to Tory spending plans, a failure to be honest with the electorate about the anti-democratic Transatlantic Trade and Investment Pact, a tendency to ape Tory “scrounger” rhetoric about disabled people and a foreign policy which on key international issues such as the far-right takeover of Ukraine remains indistinguishable from that of the coalition sap the life out of Labour’s vision.

By contrast, when Ed Miliband has been bold — taking on Rupert Murdoch during the phone-hacking scandal, pledging to freeze energy bills, preventing a disastrous war on Syria in which our allies would have been the butchers of Isis — Labour’s support has soared.

Mr Skinner is spot on when he links Labour’s historic 1945 victory with the audacity of its programme. And this is from a man who knows what he’s talking about — having been returned for the Bolsover constituency on 11 successive occasions.

Mr Miliband, take note. There is very little time left.