In Crewe, a single mum of four working as a cleaner for ten years has just been made redundant. She had been furloughed, but they will now replace her permanent job with agency cleaners on zero hour contracts. She relies on her local food bank and delayed universal credit.

Another day, another job loss. Bentley Motors are to scrap at least a thousand workers in my area with more to come. We have become almost immune to these stories – they are routine, constant, and with crises from coronavirus to climate change they will get worse.

This raises a dilemma. Many of the people in these horror stories, in Crewe, in Britain and in other countries too, are not voting. Or worse, they are voting for the people who oversee this barbaric economy with its cuts to our vital services and handouts to the richest.

At the same time, division festers. The KKK graffiti that appeared recently in the area is not representative of my community, but mainstream right-wing talking points about immigration or “scroungers” create the space for it to exist.

Labour has struggled with this dilemma. There are some who patronise people in communities like mine as brainwashed. Plenty want to shift rightward to “where people are” on issues like welfare and migration. This does not work – having arguments on our opponents’ terms only strengthens the dominance of their views in the long run, as the evidence bears out.

Such capitulation also leads us down a dark path. One of the first acts of the Blair government, which had a substantial majority and political capital to burn, was to slash benefits for single mothers – like the cleaner I mentioned, and myself – to below what they had been under John Major’s Tory government.

Many Labour people – sadly including some on the Left – think we can simply ignore large parts of Britain and build an electoral coalition of “progressives” in cities alone. Abandoning those who the Labour Party was built to represent.

There are not enough wavering Lib Dems or Greens for this to work in any case. And advocates of such an approach often ignore the diverse urban working classes they want to speak for. It is disappointing, for example, that Labour found itself talking about ten-year sentences for damaging statues on the third anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, for which there have been no prosecutions.

Working-class people and places are not problems to be solved. Overcoming the disconnect they feel from the political process is not a box-ticking exercise. Labour must get over its tendency to be dismissive at best and terrified at worst of initiatives to organise, and build power among, its forgotten communities.

It has been a long time since we have been a mass party and as our membership began to surge in 2015, Westminster insiders were terrified of losing control. But these people are not really in control of anything when they pursue short-term, headline-chasing approaches. Trust has to be gained, and Labour has to prove it can make a tangible difference to the lives of ordinary people.

Take the second referendum disaster, where despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Labour became convinced that overturning the result of the referendum was the path to victory. Instead, we managed to both secure a Tory hard Brexit and lose working-class communities in England and Wales which had supported us for generations. If we were a party that actually listened to those communities, we may have found a less disastrous compromise.

We need to turn back to being a party of, and for, working-class people across the country. Our “many not the few” campaign in 2017 was a beginning, and it built a coalition that had promise, but we were soon back in Westminster bubble politics and wasted the opportunities the moment presented.

The reluctance to talk about class, and the view that we must be nothing more than a “progressive” party with some good policies, come from the idea that class is dead as a political category, that people are now more concerned with identity, and that to pretend otherwise is little more than nostalgia for smokestacks and coal mines.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Class shapes all other aspects of politics, including identity – for instance, regional injustices are often simply another way of pointing to the class divides and processes of disempowering working-class people which have been ongoing for decades.

As our individual working lives become fragmented, finding the common thread is difficult. But that effort is more relevant, not less. Young graduates in London struggling to make rent, migrant hospitality workers on exploitative short-term contracts, and ex-industrial workers forced into warehouses beyond their retirement age are being hurt by the same system.

The fact of class is as real as ever, and our job as a movement is to organise around it. Take the example of the school cuts campaign which united parents, teachers, communities and trade unions, and had a real impact on the 2017 election; what Jane McAlevey would call “whole worker organising.”

This kind of work is not easy. But it is more stable than being either an ideological subculture inside our comfort zone, or a weathervane guided by the Daily Mail. It is the basis for both a stable electoral coalition and a better world in which there are forces larger than a few enlightened Labour MPs to restrain the powerful.

We must start small and local, adapting to a difficult and changing context. Ian Lavery, Jon Trickett and I are (virtually) travelling across the country, listening and learning. We are going to be using these conversations to think about how we talk, how we campaign and how we build a durable, rooted Left.

And we will be finding ways to open up the Left to those who are currently switched off from politics, not just for the sake of a few token figures with good backstories for TV interviews but to drive a permanent cultural shift.

Because working-class communities are more than poverty and boarded-up high streets. Engage and involve people and you’ll find they brim with ideas and energy that can shape the future.

The Covid-19 crisis has shown us both the miserable inefficiency of a hollow state dependent on dodgy outsourcing companies, and the huge difference that communities can make acting in the common good and looking out for each other. Climate change and the other challenges we face will make this clearer.

The Black Lives Matter protests have shone a necessary light on the darkest parts of our history and how our past informs the present. To prove we are more than our past we have to create a different, better country than the one which preceded it.

Only a labour movement led by working-class communities in all their diversity can build a society where we look out for each other, live well together and leave no one behind.