Last week’s Labour conference was one of the most vibrant and exciting that I can remember, with thousands of enthusiastic new members taking part and hundreds of fringe meetings held across Brighton. Exciting ideas were discussed and debated, building on Labour’s vision of a more equal society in which prosperity is shared by the many instead of being hoarded by a few. All this made for a political energy I hadn’t seen for years.

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But today attention turns to Manchester, a city the Tories once hoped to win. Yet it is clearer than ever that they have well and truly lost the debate here. The great city of Manchester chose to elect no Tory MPs, no Tory councillors and in May this year decisively voted for Labour’s Andy Burnham to be the region’s first directly elected mayor.

So Tory members, having paid up to a whopping £520 for a standard ticket – or £400 if you’re a student – will meet in their “ring of steel” and ask why they are doing so badly. The answer is simple: they haven’t got a plan, and everyone knows it. Theresa May is too busy fending off leadership attacks to deliver anything coherent. Her inability to get a grip on Tory divisions over Brexit is evidence enough of that. The national interest takes a back seat while she does whatever is necessary to keep the Tories in government and stave off another election.

I cannot remember a manifesto so roundly slated and so quickly shelved as this year’s Tory effort. Standing on a platform of seven years of failure, it offered nothing but insecurity for working people and pensioners, and no support for our ailing public services. Labour may not have won the election, but by denying May the majority she expected, Jeremy Corbyn ensured that the Tory manifesto, which spelled more misery for people across the country, has been ripped to shreds.

A proposal to end the pensions triple lock: dropped. A plan to strip millions of pensioners of their winter fuel payments: dropped. A social care plan – so bad it was dubbed the “dementia tax” – dropped before the election even took place. Bringing back grammar schools and scrapping universal free school lunches, costing families almost £450 per child a year: both dropped. And let’s not forgot the desire to bring back fox hunting. I don’t know what May was thinking, but it has now, of course, been dropped.

In fact, new analysis by Labour has shown that since the general election, the Tories have dropped, shelved or made no announcements on more than 180 manifesto commitments. That’s more than one a day since it was published. This is all because of Labour’s success in spreading our message of a better, fairer Britain. All because we removed May’s majority, and with it, her legitimacy.

We’re told that the theme of the prime minister’s conference speech will again be “a country that works for everyone”, a line she used in her first speech as PM to much acclaim. But after 15 months of May, the country still isn’t working for most people. Debt continues to spiral. Working people’s real wages are still lower than they were in 2010. Six million people are in jobs paying less than the living wage and a million people are on zero-hours contracts. As she said during the election campaign: “Nothing has changed. Nothing. Has. Changed.”

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That’s especially true in Manchester and across the north, where they are feeling the brunt of Tory austerity more than anywhere else. The Tories are spending £1,500 per head more on transport in London than in the north. The anticipated loss as a result of social security changes in the north is £380 a year, compared with £290 in the south west and £250 in the south east. Nearly a quarter of all current recipients of universal credit (124,000) live in the north west; 90,000 people in the north of England are hit by the bedroom tax compared with 50,000 in the south. And the IFS earlier this year said that the north, the Midlands and Wales all have median incomes between 5-10% below the Great Britain average.

Labour is now a party united behind Corbyn’s leadership. United in our vision for a better society and united in our ambition to expose the weakness of May’s government, to bring our country together and to win the next general election – whenever it may come.

• Tom Watson is deputy leader of the Labour party