I’ve been having this recurring nightmare. It’s one I first had 22 years ago on April 9 1992.

It started with a pleasant dream of a Labour victory at the polls after 13 years of Thatcherism and ended with the gut-wrenching reality that the people of Britain had voted for another five years of right-wing Toryism.

The hope of Neil Kinnock’s second crack at taking down the Tories was dashed in a bitter night of defeat. Was it the Sheffield rally, Kinnock’s terminal verbosity or simply prejudice against a ginger Welshman? 

The Sun’s claim to have won it was not backed up by a 1994 voter study although it must have had an effect. Its famously brutal media campaign aimed to convince enough people that Kinnock would tax them to within an inch of their lives. This was powerfully reinforced by the Tories’ “Labour tax bombshell” campaign.

A combination of these factors, plus Major’s common man image, helped the Tories win a record vote that they have never matched since. 

The study also found that half a million potential Labour voters dropped off the register to avoid the poll tax — a truly bitter indictment of that hated Thatcher legacy. 

For the 58 per cent of the country who were sick to their back teeth of the Tories, it was a terrible night, followed by a five-year hangover.

For Labour, it was the final end of the dream that you could go to the electorate with something solidly social democratic — certainly not Michael Foot’s socialist platform of 1983 — and win a majority.

That cruel lesson has never been forgotten by the current generation of Labour politicians. Hence the caution, the triangulation and the mirroring of Tory and tabloid language on welfare and austerity. 

The 1992 election was the cataclysm that gave birth to new Labour and to the children of new Labour, the party’s current pair of Eds.

The trouble is, here we are sixmonths from a general election and the very same pattern that occured in 1992 appears to be playing out.

Labour’s modest poll lead is evaporating even quicker than the one Kinnock had before polling day. 

The party is attacked from the right for proposing anything that will shift wealth and income away from the rich toward lower-income voters. 

Miliband seems unable to win over voters. Every time he tries to break out of the neoliberal straitjacket, Ed Balls is waiting to strap him in again. 

Miliband and Balls have yet to offer working-class and middle-class voters a compelling vision of a different Britain, of a government that defends and supports the majority against the oligarchy and the entrenched elites. 

It’s the kind of politics that did well for Lloyd George a century ago when he faced down a Tory House of Lords and brought in the first elements of the welfare state in the face of ruling-class hostility.

However, Labour has historically never been a party that mobilises an alliance of voters against privilege. 

That mobilisation occured in 1945 on the back of returning troops and workers who had been radicalised during the war. My father Ken Gill, then 18, was a Labour election agent during the 1945 campaign. His man lost in Tory Wiltshire, but nationwide the party won a surprise landslide  against Winston Churchill on the back of a wave of change. 

Similarly, Labour’s slim majority in 1974 was on the back of a mass trade union militancy that pushed the party into backing a left-wing manifesto. (Ken played a not insignificant part in that too.) 

The unions have never since been able to exert such an influence on the party’s direction.

There’s the difficulty. Where is the new majority going to come from if Labour will not call it into existence? There are the stirrings of resistance among public-sector workers fighting austerity and among disparate groups resisting attack like the E15 mums and occupiers in Parliament Square, but politically Labour keeps such movements at arm’s length. 

Labour’s leadership seems innured to the possibility that voters will support a moderately radical programme, one that offers a new start for the country — based on house-building, nationalising rail, a green new deal and an end to rampant landlordism and super-rich tax evasion. 

Labour’s instinct is to control expectations, limit the demands of working-class voters, and come to power on the back of “core votes” and a generalised mood of change.It’s a limiting and very probably self-defeating strategy born of obediance to economic and political orthodoxy. 

What we need is a populist left-wing force capable of mobilising the disaffected majority. Labour as a cautious reformist movement, most recently transformed into a party of light neoliberalism, cannot do this. The party is wedded to an idea of parliamentary centralism and tends to distrust all extraparliamentary movements. 

Ukip has meanwhile soaked up the undercurrents of anti-establishment anger, fear over economic insecurity and inchoate nationalism. 

To the left the Greens are rapidly picking up new members and support as people detect radicalism and serious intent in the party’s direction — elements singularly lacking in Labour’s lacklustre pronouncements.

Which brings me back to what happens on general election night. 

It doesn’t take all that many voters to look at the possibility of Ed Miliband as Prime Minister, to hesitate, then put their cross somewhere else. Then whoosh — we end up with another five years of right-wing Toryism, and the destruction of the remaining vestiges of our post-war welfare state.

Let’s not pretend it can’t happen.  

It happened for John Major in 1992. He had the advantage of being a new leader with an ordinary bloke persona. Cameron, by contrast, is burdened with the face of privilege and the record of five years in government. He hopes the bribe of unfunded tax cuts will save him.

The parallel to 1992 is even stronger with Labour. There is a right-wing media campaign against a not very popular leader. We saw how it operates in the aftermath of Miliband’s conference speech with the endless commentary on the “missing” deficit section. 

Of course some things have changed since 1992. 

The Tory press has had its wings clipped by the hacking scandal and there is a whole new world of online media that dilutes the power of the press to dictate the election story. There’s also the rise of the SNP in Scotland and Ukip now threatening the traditional parties.

Austerity hits a solid 30-40 per cent of the population and wage stagnation hits many more. If Labour’s offer is austerity-lite, working-class voters in Scotland can opt for the SNP’s social-democratic nationalism while in England, Ukip’s populist Thatcherism is sadly winning over many who’ve had enough of the old parties. 

To avoid this electoral squeeze, Labour needs to mobilise millions of voters, including those who would otherwise not vote, like the millions who voted in the Scottish referendum. 

To do this they need a clear message of hope — a living wage, building  homes, ending austerity for the poor and reigning in the rich. 

The Tories desperately need a re-run of 1992 when John Major won 14 million votes for the Tories — its highest-ever vote. In 2010 Cameron only got 10.7 million.

The best hope between now and election day is that the mood of disaffection spreads, the trade unions and new protest movements continue resisting coalition attacks and victories — however small — engender optimism and hope. 

The alternative is despair and a Tory victory. If that happens, to paraphrase the Sun in April 1992, before they leave Britain, will the last non-Tory turn out the lights?