I will build at least 10,000 social housing units. As far as the right to buy is concerned – it is suspended for new properties | Andy Burnham

LLast Thursday people voted for change. There now seems to be a consensus that the country needs a fresh start. And yet, anyone who has been on the doorstep lately knows that this is not a moment from 1997. There is great desperation towards politics. There will be no honeymoon for the new government. People see that things are broken and they lose faith that politicians can fix them.

So it’s a difficult climate for progressive parties and I worry that the upcoming general election will only worsen the mood. A Tory party is unlikely to be quiet in one corner. My gut feeling is that she will opt for an election in December, hoping to save seats from the toxic combination of low winter turnout and the fallout from the US election the month before. The only option left for the Tories seems to be channeling the negative energy of the “culture wars”.

So how should we respond and ensure the election brings the change we need?

First, we should call the culture wars what they are: an attempt by right-wing parties to distract people from injustice everywhere and blame it on their fellow citizens rather than on the governments that caused it. In media interviews, Labor people should not get drawn into the details of identity politics and instead highlight this right-wing playbook.

Second, Labor should now focus the election on the details of a few domestic policies that are generally more trusted by the left.

The best antidote to the cynicism of our time is to go beyond the general platitudes of the past and put forward honest, credible and detailed plans to solve fundamental problems such as the NHS and housing. Last Thursday’s election results offer us a real opportunity to do just that and change the narrative of our politics. We should take full advantage of it.

There are now 11 Labor mayors across England, representing almost half the population. The joint authorities they run provide a supply infrastructure in the English regions that simply did not exist in 1997. Before the election, the party could agree detailed care plans with these mayors on what should be done in their regions to solve the housing crisis in the first term of a Labor government.

One of the reasons housing often doesn’t play a role in elections is that promises in past elections to build hundreds of thousands of homes simply don’t make sense. In contrast, a local plan to build a new generation of social housing in the East Midlands, identifying brownfield sites and providing a number within a parliament, would make a lot of sense indeed.

Today I will set out a plan to solve Greater Manchester’s housing crisis within a decade, which could form the basis for this new approach.

This includes building a new generation of social housing in all ten boroughs and at least 10,000 within this mayoral term. To raise standards, we will introduce a new Good Landlord Charter and give our rented property residents the right to request a property check. We will take tougher action against landlords who rent unsuitable and unsafe homes, including making far greater use of compulsory purchase powers.

But I come back to the word honest in connection with these plans. One of the main reasons why the country has not built enough social housing for decades is the right-to-buy policy. Municipalities have no incentive to finance the construction of new houses if they can be sold cheaply and quickly. In the face of a desperate housing shortage, existing buying laws mean that we are effectively trying to fill up a bathroom without being allowed to plug it back in.

As English decentralization becomes more established, a theme emerges: fixing the basics of life – housing, utilities, transport – means undoing things that went wrong in the 1980s. Just as Greater Manchester was the first to end bus deregulation, we now want the Right to Buy policy to be scrapped for all new social housing we build in our city region. To put it bluntly, there is no honest solution to the housing crisis as long as it remains in its current form.

In this way, English devolution is beginning to change politics for the better. For too long there was a consensus in Westminster that some of the dogmas of the Thatcher era could not be questioned. But since the arrival of the Labor mayors, trains and buses have come back under public control and issues such as homelessness have come into much greater focus.

Slowly but surely we are freeing ourselves from the oppressive effects of the 1980s. We now have the real prospect of a Labor Prime Minister working with Labor mayors to solve the housing crisis and bring about real reconciliation.

For Labor this may not be a 1997 moment. It could be much better in many ways.