There is this deep sense that life in the UK has been getting significantly worse in so many different ways and this shows no sign of stopping.

People are working long hours, in low-paid, insecure jobs, then going back to cold, expensive to run homes. Things don’t work any more – from getting a GP’s appointment, to catching a bus, to having your bin collected.

Even the things that bring people joy in life and foster a sense of community – having a pint down the pub with your mates, going for a meal out with your family, going to the cinema or the theatre or the football – have become unaffordable luxuries to so many. Free public spaces, like libraries, are also few and far between in far too many places.

It is clear that people are feeling very squeezed financially, and the economic pain isn’t going away: the OECD says that we’re set to have the highest inflation in the G7.

With this growing sense of disillusionment, isolation and anger, the ideas, arguments and narratives about both the causes and solutions matter.

Reform is attempting to sell the lie that removing rights from migrants and deporting people will solve our problems. They’re now even threatening people who have built a life in this country for many years, splitting up families, uprooting communities, decimating workplaces, in a race to the bottom on who can talk the toughest on immigration.

Fascism is, of course, a false revolution. If they stopped the boats tomorrow, if they deported every person who wasn’t born in this country, people’s lives wouldn’t improve at all – in fact, they would get worse. Because the real cause of our problems would remain.

But instead of taking on these far-right lies, presenting an alternative narrative and actually improving people’s lives, our party is joining in.

We’re in government. We have to start acting like it and not follow a narrative shaped by Farage, the right-wing press and their wealthy backers. It is making our party look like a pale imitation of Reform, which is only adding momentum to the full fat version.

And at the same time, the rest of our voter coalition is punishing us. There has long been the assumption that those on the left in this country have nowhere else to go. But it’s no longer true. Progressive voters have other choices. Green Party membership has now surpassed 85,000 (Editor’s Note: now past 100,000) and support for the party in the polls is rapidly rising.

I believe that it is possible to turn this situation around and for us to build a coalition of voters that will enable us to win the next election. I believe that there is a narrative that can beat Reform, policies that demonstrate to the electorate whose side we’re on, and changes we can make that people will feel in their daily lives and in their communities. This has to be rooted in economic justice.

Because people can see that while their material conditions are deteriorating and they are struggling, this isn’t the case for everyone. We have shocking levels of deep-rooted inequality, and people are furious about that too.

One of the reasons why the electorate was so angry at the last Conservative government was because taxpayers were robbed to give lucrative contracts to Tory friends and donors. People understood this as naked, corrupt profiteering in a crisis at the expense of us all.

Even Reform has cottoned on. Farage once represented Thatcherism on steroids, and I have no doubt that is where his true allegiances lie. But now, he’s talking about nationalising water and bringing Tata Steel into public ownership. Because he understands that there are votes to be won through this narrative, through these policies.

That is the narrative that we have to own. We have to be clear that it is a system built on the relentless pursuit of profit that has led us here and we have to show that we can build an economy that serves us instead.

There are parts of our existing programme we can build upon. We have to stop people being exploited as cheap labour. Workers need better pay and conditions. The government must keep to its promises on employment rights, properly ban zero hours contracts and deliver a large uplift to the minimum wage. We need to go even further in terms of empowering unions, scrapping not just the most recent anti-trade union laws but the ones brought in from Thatcher onwards as well.

It’s great that we are creating jobs through major infrastructure projects, but our industrial strategy should be even more ambitious. We have to push against the deindustrialisation and service-isation of the jobs market, which has produced stagnant wages and deteriorating conditions. We should re-centre the priorities of the economy around the principle of care – care for each other and the environment.

I’m also pleased that we’re renationalising passenger services on our railways. Rail fares have risen by 40% on average across the UK since privatisation. This must be used as a tool to cut them.

But we shouldn’t stop there: we should bring water and energy into public ownership too, and use this to lower bills.

At the next Budget, the government must not cut spending: we should tax the rich instead. A 2% tax on assets worth over £10 million would bring in billions annually.

And with a raging housing crisis, we cannot have rents increased on a whim based on whatever a landlord feels like charging. The Renters Rights Bill is a good start but we need rent controls as well.

It is policies like these that show people whose side we’re on, that provide proof that change is possible, that can give people hope for the future.

And at the same time, we mustn’t duck the question of migration but tackle it head on. We have to be clear that migrants are being scapegoated because Nigel Farage wants to protect his rich mates and donors. We need to reject social conservatism, instead of seeing it as a necessary trade off. We should have confidence in the ability of our economic policies to improve people’s lives and win people round, and the backbone not to capitulate to forces that want to exclude groups of people from our vision of a better society.

Because the rights of migrants, disabled people, women, trans people and people of colour aren’t a nice to have add on that is separate to “bread and butter issues”, but a precondition of a society in which everyone can thrive, everyone is respected.

We have to be proud of our diversity, as so many people in this country already are. And we have to foster a sense of belonging and identity that is about more than race or whether you were born here.

Now I’m not saying that doing these things will be easy, but at this point, it really is go big or go home. Because if we don’t change course, we will be defeated at the next general election and we will hand the keys to Number 10 to Nigel Farage. A far right party will be in power in the UK, with all the misery that that will entail for countless people, and it will be our fault. We can’t let it happen.

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Nadia Whittome is the Member of Parliament for Nottingham East.