I nominated Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership contest last year because I believed the party needed to hear his radical voice. Members responded to him in their thousands because he was giving voice to a language that they had not heard spoken in frontline politics for a very long time.

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I was motivated by that and I was proud to serve in Jeremy’s frontbench team so we could try to put our politics into practice in opposition and create a force that could build a radical government.

Jeremy and I share the same politics. We have voted in the same lobby in parliament on every vote since I was elected – on welfare cuts, Syria, refugees, Trident and workers’ rights. These beliefs are shared by thousands of members, trade unionists, councillors and MPs.

But the climate today is wholly different from last summer, and the national debate has never been more hostile to our values. We are under attack from vicious nationalists and a Tory party single-mindedly determined to rule forever. In this time we need a leader who can defend our values and reach out to the country with a clear, radical message and strategy on how the Labour party can transform lives.

The galling fact is that not nearly enough Labour voters see Corbyn as being the next prime minister, and nearly two-thirds of trade unionists think he is doing badly. With the tumultuous consequences of Brexit likely to lead to a recession, our NHS under unprecedented strain, a housing crisis and low-paid, insecure work, our millions of supporters should be able to look to our party and see a government in waiting. But the people who need a Labour government see nothing of the sort.

That’s why I am very clear. I would rather have Owen Smith as a radical Labour prime minister than a Labour party condemned to opposition. That’s why, though I know that when this contest started they may not have known too much about him, it is so vital that members give Smith a hearing this summer.

It was in the desperate recession of the 1930s that that giant of our movement, Ernest Bevin, who founded the Transport and General Workers’ Union and later served in a Labour government, recognised that unless we could translate our radical politics into power then we have nothing. “When the time comes,” he said, “we don’t just want a penny on the pound or an hour off the day. We want to secure for our people nothing less than the mastery of their own lives.”

Through power we delivered the NHS, the welfare state, the Equal Pay Act, maternity pay, the minimum wage. Landmark achievements for people – that is what Labour is about and that is why we exist.

Owen Smith has a plan to move on from simply opposing austerity to how we can transform our communities

A socialist to his core, Smith is in that fine Labour tradition and he has lost no time in setting out what his Labour leadership and his Labour government will look like. He knows the mistakes made in the past long before he was elected – that’s why he has said every Labour policy has to be tested against this benchmark: “Is it going to reduce inequalities in wealth, in power, in outcomes and opportunities, or is it not?”

One of his first acts will be to rewrite clause IV of our constitution and put inequality at the heart of our mission, so that on day one of the next Labour government we can start to put right the utter shame of an economy and society in which children in some parts of my constituency watch as their peers in more affluent areas grow up healthier, go to better schools, earn a higher wage and live longer.

My experience of Smith is that he is a Labour fighter who takes it to the Tories and wins. On tax credits and cuts to personal independence payments he was leading Labour’s fight on behalf of the most vulnerable and turning the Tories back just hours after the measures were announced.

And he has a plan to move on from simply opposing austerity to how we can transform our communities. That’s what his £200bn infrastructure plan will do. I have been calling for this scale of investment in Sheffield and around the country ever since I was elected, and to see a candidate pushing a radical policy that could genuinely change the lives of my constituents is so exciting.

In the difficult months and years ahead there is so much at stake and we need a Labour party fighting back.

Corbyn has done our party a huge service and he has made considerable sacrifices to do so. We are now firmly and irrevocably an anti-austerity party. But I think it is only possible for us to defend our values, reach out to those who do not feel represented by Labour and get into government with a clear, articulate and radical new leadership under Owen Smith.