The Brexit debacle is an obnoxious man following you everywhere, clashing cymbals that drown out anything you say or think. Don’t try to speak louder: he’ll just clash them harder. But if a “Brexit election” is upon us – one entirely and narrowly framed by Britain’s relationship with the European Union – then our current turmoil is merely the appetiser for much worse to come. That is the plan of Boris Johnson’s unelected co-prime minister, Dominic Cummings: sweep up the Brexit party vote, drown out a Labour domestic agenda that proved popular in 2017, and fragment the anti-Tory vote with the willing assistance of the Lib Dem leader, Jo Swinson.

There are those who treat the Brexit crisis as though it has landed from a clear blue sky: many were jelly-kneed at the admirable 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, claiming that it represented, as former New Labour spin-doctor Alastair Campbell put it, a Britain that was “modern, vibrant, dynamic, outward-looking, multicultural, confident, welcoming, successful, united”. It was no such thing: the Tory/Lib Dem government was busy offloading the costs of a crash caused by big finance on to the backs of those who had nothing to do with it: slashing and privatising services, scapegoating migrants – two months before Windrush Britons were valorised in the thanksgiving ceremony, the “hostile environment” immigration policy had been introduced – and ravaging the welfare state. But the Brexit result produced one consensus: that it could not be understood without examining what Theresa May termed “the burning injustices”.

What of a housing crisis that has left one in 200 Britons homeless? Or of one fifth of our population living in poverty?

May’s objective in 2017 was to wage a Brexit election themed around crushing “the saboteurs”, as the Daily Mail labelled her opponents. This was Labour’s nightmare, but its manifesto – described by some of its rightwing MPs as “childish” and a “10-year old’s letter to Santa Claus” – reframed the election as “for the many not the few”, consigning a Tory party convinced it would win a 100-seat majority to a hung parliament. Surely repeating the same trick now seems impossible: both because the Brexit cliff edge is far closer and the country is far more bitterly polarised over the EU question than it was just two years ago.

However great the challenge, Labour must reframe a contest that may define British politics for a generation. Sure, Brexit cannot be simplistically reduced to a class conflict: most full-time and part-time workers voted remain, as did those classified as working class who were aged under 35 and/or ethnic minority, and indeed those in working-class heartlands from Scotland to Liverpool. Most middle-class pensioners voted for Brexit, as did about two-thirds of council and housing association tenants. Both remain and leave are broad coalitions: the question is, what made the latter victorious? According to a London School of Economics study last year, without the Tory/Lib Dem austerity programme – not least real-terms cuts to social security, education and healthcare – leave support would have been 10% lower. Combined with the scapegoating of migrants for injustices stoked by Tory/Lib Dem rule, the real surprise of 2016 should be that the leave vote was not higher.

‘Britain is scarred by regional inequalities: they helped drive the resentments that led to Brexit.’ Photograph: Patrik Slezak/Alamy Stock Photo

The anti-Tory election pitch must be that a “Brexit election” cannot simply obsess over an economic and political relationship with the EU, important though that is, but address the resentments generated by these injustices. If an election that could determine the government for the next half a decade doesn’t resolve them, then what comes next?

The Tories will talk of turning on the spending taps, which in practice means addressing what they see as the focus-grouped priorities of leave voters, – not reversing a decade of slash-and-burn cuts, let alone the social damage of Thatcherism. What, then, must an election answer? Britain is scarred by some of the worst regional inequalities in the western world: they helped drive the resentments that led to Brexit. Under current government plans, London is set to receive nearly three times more transport spending per person than the north of England. A report headed by ex-civil service head Bob Kerslake earlier this year called for a national renewal fund to tackle regional inequalities, modelled on Germany’s post-Berlin Wall reunification. That would mean hiking regional spending to at least £10bn a year over the next quarter of a century, alongside a programme of radical decentralisation. Such proposals must surely be at the heart of an election debate.

A squeeze on workers’ wages unprecedented since the early 19th century is a key driver in our turmoil: this week, research by the New Economics Foundation finds that living standards remain below pre-crash levels. It cannot be divorced from Britain’s productivity crisis – worse than any time for over a century, and more than 18 per cent below its pre-Lehman Brothers trend – which has robbed workers of up to £5,000 in income. Ending this lost decade must be a central election theme. Even the Financial Times, that well-known den of socialist agitation, is arguing for capitalism to be “reset”, decrying an economy based on rent extraction, financial speculation (“liberalised finance tends to metastasise, like a cancer”), inequality and stagnant productivity. All are factors in an “increasingly degraded democracy”, concludes its chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf. He’s right, and a radical root-and-branch restructuring of the economy must accordingly be at the centre of the election debates.

What of a housing crisis that has left one in every 200 Britons homeless or inadequately housed, and millions trapped in an unregulated, insecure and rip-off private rented sector? What of how the world’s sixth biggest economy has left a fifth of its population in poverty? What of a social care crisis imperilling the security of older and disabled people, or the dismal failure of universal credit, which Gordon Brown warns could cause riots in Britain’s streets? What of a climate emergency – we have just 11 years to prevent disaster according to the UN – whose consequences will include drastic economic and social dislocation? Unless the election tackles these multiple, overlapping crises, we may look back at this era as one of relative tranquillity.

It suits both Tories and Lib Dems to make this election purely about Brexit. While supporting austerity, For the sake of a few more seats, Swinson cynically portrays Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn as the same on Brexit, as though there is no difference between a hard Brexit and a second referendum with remain on the ballot. Instead, we need a campaign that speaks to the crises endangering the very fabric of society – and which offers a weary nation some hope.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist