Electoral patterns in the UK are wild and unruly. Since the financial crash in 2008 the UK has elected a coalition, and delivered David Cameron a tiny majority only for the triumphant prime minister to resign a year later: a speedy departure without precedent.

What happens if nobody wins the election? 1974 is a warning | Steve Richards Read more

There have been two seismic referendums: one took the UK out of Europe; the other led to the SNP dominating Scotland. And last summer the two main parties simultaneously held deranged leadership contests. The Tory campaign was brief and elected a new prime minister. The Labour equivalent dragged on for months and elected the same leader.

This year’s early election feeds the turbulence too. In the great Shakespearean sweep of politics, a prime minister who challenges the natural order becomes a victim of the subsequent disorder. Polls suggest that Theresa May will win, but her campaign has not gone to plan. It did not do so when Edward Heath broke with the natural order and called an early election in February 1974. Nearly all the lofty columnists had written off Heath’s Labour opponent, Harold Wilson. Wilson’s colleagues wrote in their diaries that he was doomed. It was Wilson who became prime minister.

Yet out of the current electoral eruptions a new order of sorts is starting to take shape. It is a new order that moves the debate to the left. This election is dark and absurd – but also the first since the financial crash that addresses some of the deep challenges of our times.

Compare the themes of this election with those in 2010 and 2015. Both of those were framed around an outdated Thatcherite fantasy, although well to the right of any policy Margaret Thatcher herself would have espoused.

After the crash a young, inexperienced Conservative leadership looked back to the past for guidance, as politicians often do. They focused on the virtues of a smaller state, pledging to wipe out the deficit in a single parliament. Although they failed markedly in this mission, they had the chutzpah to make the same pledge in 2015. A partisan media accepted their terms in both elections. The theme of every interview, and the test of most editorials, was a single question: “What are you going to do about the deficit?” The election arguments were framed by the early 1980s, when Thatcher and the US president Ronald Reagan began their experiment in new forms of economic liberalism.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The election arguments of an inexperienced Conservative leadership were framed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s experiment in economic liberalism.’ Photograph: Bettmann Archive

Thankfully the debate in this election is different. Theresa May and her small team were commendably grown-up in refusing to rule out all tax increases, and proposing to end both the “triple lock” on pensions and a universal winter fuel allowance. She chose the wrong social care policy, and much greater care was required to clear the ground, but at least she does not promise another “review”, or a review of the last review.

The section in the Conservatives’ manifesto on the important role that government can play marks a significant move away from the party’s recent past. Perhaps they will prove to be mere words – but, contrary to mythology, positions adopted in an election campaign do tend to frame what follows in government.

Labour’s manifesto was always going to be a big break from the party’s recent past. In some respects the leap is liberating, moving on from previously understandable but paralysing attempts to navigate the mad UK pre-election “tax and spend” debate: “Every penny of the £10.50 we plan to spend on reducing class sizes in a trial scheme for five nursery schools is carefully costed by charging owners of £2m homes 10p more to park their cars.” That never appeared, but wouldn’t have looked out of place in any Labour manifesto between 1997 and 2015.

For Labour’s current leadership, armed at least with a clearer sense of purpose than some of its bewildered internal opponents, the manifesto in part becomes an argument about a different set of values and priorities rather than an accountants’ manual. When the former SDP leader David Owen read the manifesto he was reminded of SDP election programmes, and made a donation to Labour.

Though the two main parties are miles apart, the questions being posed by both are unrecognisable from recent elections. What taxes should rise? How do we pay for social care? What form should an industrial strategy take? What markets work, and what should a government do if they fail? How do you meet a housing deficit as well as a spending deficit?

Unsurprisingly, those who asked different questions over the past two decades are suddenly powerless. Not long ago many commentators hailed Cameron and George Osborne as the commanding figures of our era, dominating the “centre ground” (that deeply subjective term). Now Cameron is in his new garden shed writing his memoirs, and Osborne edits a newspaper. Their political model, Tony Blair, runs a thinktank.

They remain brilliant communicators, but ones who struggle to navigate the wild terrain that has emerged since 2008. Blair was the author of that anti-politics phrase “What matters is what works”. The essence of politics is a debate about what works and why. This general election moves a little closer back to that essence.

Some commentators try to make sense of the scattering of their own powerless heroes: David Miliband would have become Labour leader if he had wooed a few more MPs; Jeremy Corbyn would not be leader if Labour MPs had not nominated him; if Cameron and Osborne had chosen a different date for the EU referendum, they would have won; the only reason why the Conservatives’ manifesto moves away from Reagan/Thatcherite liberalism is because May’s adviser, Nick Timothy, holds freakish sway.

But at some point even the most determined backward-looking custodians of the “centre ground” must acknowledge that a new pattern has belatedly formed in response to the 2008 crash and the challenges of globalisation.

Twenty years ago Labour won a landslide when much of the political agenda was still rooted on the right: Labour would stick to Conservative spending plans; Labour would not increase income tax. Today polls suggest the Conservatives will win next week – but on several fronts the UK’s political agenda moves leftwards.

• This article was amended on 31 May 2017. An earlier version said there have been two referendums in the UK since 2008. This has been corrected to say “two seismic referendums”.