Our sense of history shapes how we think about who we are. One of the distinguishing features of the left in Britain is that it holds to a remorselessly bleak and miserabilist view of our recent politics. This is a history in which Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 marked the start of a still continuing fall from political grace made evident by the triumph of a free-market, get-what-you-can, neoliberal ideology, dizzying levels of inequality, social decay, rampant individualism, state authoritarianism and political corruption.

The left does not like what has happened to us and it does not like what we have become.

I think that this history is wrong and self-harming. It is wrong because Britain has in many (although certainly not all) respects become a more politically attractive and, much as I cringe whenever I hear this term, progressive country over the past few decades. It is self-harming because this bleak history undermines faith in politics. Britain is not a social democratic paradise. But it is a long way from being a poster child for neoliberalism. Leftwing ideas and arguments have shaped and continue to shape our politics.

However, left-of-centrism, the political creed of gradualist social democracy, as it has been practised and defended by Fabians, Croslandites, 1980s stalwarts such as Denis Healey and Roy Hattersley and, more recently, New Labour, looks to have been one of the more obvious casualties of the economic and political crisis of the past decade. Indeed, it is not just the left of centre that has been battered. The Europhile soft left of the Conservative party that Ken Clarke once led has been marginalised, while the Liberal Democrats are flatlining. “Centrist dad” has become a go-to piece of political abuse. Middle-aged men who fail to recognise how the world has changed and respond to demands for political change with smirks and lectures on the perils of political radicalism are mocked.

So I come to write in defence of left-of-centrism and I do so as a Volvo-driving, 48-year-old father of two who really thinks that (most) music was better in the early 1990s.

The most obvious and well-rehearsed defence is a pragmatic one: it makes good electoral sense. To win elections, you need to appeal to voters at the centre and this inevitably entails political compromise, soft-peddling and catch-all policies intended to appeal to as many voters as possible.

I don’t think this is the best defence of centrism but it is an important argument to start with because it acquired the status of received wisdom shortly after Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader. It has been just as consistently derided since Labour did so unexpectedly well in the general election last year. But, nearly a year on, it does still feel reasonable to compare the pluses and minuses of that election.

Labour did unexpectedly well for two reasons. First, turnout rose for the fourth consecutive election in a row. This allowed Labour to pull off the amazing feat of winning in places such as Canterbury, where students at the University of Kent who had not voted in 2015 voted in overwhelming numbers for Corbyn. The early results from the British Election Study are that turnout among voters aged 18-24 did not actually increase. But Labour did have a 50 percentage point lead over the Tories among these voters and that does count as its own kind of youthquake. Second, Labour benefited from the collapse of Ukip’s national vote from nearly 12% to just under 2%. Around three-and-a-half percentage points of Labour’s eventual 40% of the national vote came from people who had voted Ukip in 2015.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘ The Europhile soft left of the Conservative party that Ken Clarke once led has been marginalised.’ Photograph: Felix Clay/The Guardian

On the other hand, more ex-Ukip voters switched to the Conservatives than they did to Labour. This is one of the reasons why the Conservatives took seats off Labour in the north of England and Midlands. The other piece of bad news for Labour was that only 2% of people who had voted for the Conservatives in 2015 voted Labour in 2017. In 1997, by comparison, 10% of Conservative voters switched to Labour.

If it is going to win an outright majority in the next election, Labour will need to gain at least another 60 seats. This is not an impossibly large number. Labour picked up more than 140 seats in 1997 and the Conservatives gained nearly 100 in 2010.

What next? Labour can hope to increase turnout further. But this strategy, while it worked better than expected in 2017, is going to be subject to diminishing returns. How many voters who decided to stay at home in 2017 because they were unconvinced by Corbyn are going to come out and vote next time? Ukip’s vote has already been carved up. There are no great potential gains there. It is possible the SNP might implode but the Scottish Conservatives look as likely to benefit from that as Scottish Labour.

All of which suggests that if Labour is going to win in the future it is going to have to do again what it managed in 1964, October 1974 and 1997: that is to persuade a lot of people who voted Conservative to vote for it.

At the moment, according to polls, Labour is still struggling to do this. There is, though, a good news story to tell. The Conservatives may have won the most votes in the last three general elections but the electorate has distinctly leftwing and definitely non-neoliberal views on key political issues. As of last year, and for the first time since around 2005, there is more public support for increasing taxes and spending more on health, education and social benefits than there is for leaving taxes and spending as they are.

Two-thirds of people think the government has a responsibility to reduce income differences between the rich and poor. Four out of five believe government has a responsibility to provide decent housing for those who can’t afford it and well over 90% believe government should provide health care for the sick and a decent standard of living for the old.

In 2015, other polls found that nearly 80% of people agreed that big business in this country has too much power and nearly 50% that major public services ought to be in state ownership. All this helps to explain why Corbyn did so well in 2017.

But there is a catch. Regardless of what they think when it comes to particular policy issues, most voters still regard themselves as being centrist. The polling company YouGov regularly asks people about their underlying political positions. In February 2017, it found that 46% described themselves as being at the centre or slightly to the right or left of centre.

Only 6% said they were very right wing or very left wing. A successful left-of-centre party needs to find a way of tapping into voters’ often quite leftwing views while, at the same time, appearing centrist and avoiding seeming too radical. This is not an easy task and it is not one that Corbyn is making look any easier.

There is, however, a second piece of good news here. Centrist parents are in a pretty interesting political position. They and their friends have children who are struggling with debt, short-term contacts and stupid rents. They or their friends have elderly parents who are being failed by a social care system whose brutal failures are life-destroying. Centrists may mock the revolutionary aspirations of idealistic and naive youth, but they are not doomed to think that everything is OK and that thinking otherwise is just silly.

So there is plenty of opportunity here for Labour and other parties on the left to talk about how tuition fees and university funding, housing and social care need fixing and how this will cost money. Furthermore, there is scope to do this without centrist voters necessarily rolling their eyes and asking where the money tree is growing. Centrist voters are not neoliberals in disguise. They recognise the argument that markets routinely fail and that government needs to correct those failures. To put this same point a little bit more critically, the left needs to start thinking about the best way to appeal to voters at the centre rather than simply mocking them for being old and not recognising the folly of their ways.

But enough of elections and the pragmatic case for centrism. The more substantive defence of centrism and left-of-centre politics rests on arguments about how we view politics and understand history.

The Corbynite left thrives on an absolutist sense of history. May 1979 and the Conservatives’ general election victory was a year zero. Since then, everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. The Conservatives have won seven of the past 10 elections. And when they lost, that did not really count because New Labour was basically no different. Neoliberalism is and remains the ideology of the age to which all other evils can be traced.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The Corbynite left thrives on an absolutist sense of history.’ Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

The welfare state has been pulled apart. Public services have been devastated. Inequality is out of control and has pushed us to the edge of social breakdown. The bankers have got away with it and nobody has been held to account for what happened in 2008. The environment is being destroyed. The political system is broken and politicians are invariably corrupt. Given the scale of the problems the country faces, centrist dads with their “on the one hand” this and “on the other hand” that evasions are patently absurd.

This miserabilist sense of our recent history is, interestingly, shared by those on the non-centrist right. Daily Mail journalists, Ukip activists and those parts of the Conservative party that despaired of David Cameron’s social liberalism and Europhilia are as sure as the Corbynite left that Britain is going to the dogs. The left and the right disagree about what has gone wrong in Britain and about when it went wrong.

The right finds its scapegoats in leftwing teachers, BBC bureaucrats, Eurocrats and Brexit saboteurs. It looks back to an imagined age in the 1950s when people did not lock their doors and we were a world power that had no truck with silly ideas about an ever-closer European Union. The left, for its part, finds its preferred hate figures in millionaire bankers, tabloid journalists, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. It looks back to the golden age of the postwar Attlee government and the establishment of a benign postwar consensus.

Yet whatever the important differences, a miserabilist sense of history has become the new normal. This is crucial because miserabilism undermines faith in political centrism. If you genuinely believe that everything is awful, then a centre-left or centre-right political party and political attitude suddenly look a lot less appealing. Also, miserabilism is tough to argue with.

The first thing the centrist needs to say and to keep saying is that politics is difficult and that radical alternatives have a habit of not always working out. Politics is the activity through which we collectively talk and decide about who we want to be. At its best, it is about setting inspiring goals, challenging power and transforming people’s lives. But on a day-to-day basis, it is also about concessions and compromises; tactical alliances; arguments and betrayals; U-turns and hypocrisies; and a never-ending sequence of policy failures and scandals. Politics is, as the German sociologist Max Weber once observed, the slow boring of hard boards. It takes time and is not always very pleasant to do. There is a chasm between the promise of what politics can sometimes achieve and the reality of what it involves.

Democratic politics is therefore always going to involve compromises and it is always going to be a laborious process involving talking to and negotiating with people you think are exceptionally condescending and routinely ill-informed. The other reason the chasm arises is that politics, if it is going to make a difference, has to be about getting things done. This means designing and implementing policies and that is something that it is really hard to get right consistently. Good policy ideas fail for all sorts of reasons. A lack of resources. A lack of clarity about objectives. A pressure to achieve immediate results and a reluctance to pilot new policies and learn lessons from early mistakes. Policies fail because the people called on to implement them don’t always agree with them – and for many other reasons. Policy does not simply go wrong because the policymakers involved are Tories and don’t care about ordinary people.

This does not mean we should shrug our shoulders and accept our lot. Many things have gone wrong that we need to do everything we can to start to fix. Obvious candidates include housing, homelessness, zero-hours contracts, universal credit, regional policy, wealth inequality, mental health care, investment and productivity and the innumerable health and social care challenges posed by an ageing population.

But a centrist will want to caution that fixing these things is going to be extremely difficult and is likely to generate new and unanticipated problems. The centrist thinks that getting policy right is always difficult but that incremental policy reforms are more likely to work than rip-it-up-and-start-again policies and that any government is only likely to be able to mobilise support and make progress on a few fundamental policy challenges at a time.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The left finds its preferred hate figures in millionaire bankers, tabloid journalists, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.’ Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

A centrist will also want to see evidence that policies have been thought out, stress-tested and costed and, as far as possible, squared with as many affected interests as possible. It is politically tempting to proclaim that everything is broken and needs to be fixed. Doing this is obviously much harder and takes a great deal of preparation.

The second thing the centrist needs to say is the flip-side of this first point. Politics does sometimes work and routinely makes a positive difference to people’s lives. This does not mean that Britain is a social democratic paradise. But I believe there is an alternative history of modern Britain in which failures are described alongside measured successes.

Neoliberalism is a long way from being the all-conquering hegemonic discourse the Corbynite left claims it to be. Indeed, neoliberalism has been pretty much disowned by the leaders of all the largest political parties. As I have already noted, public opinion remains centrist by ideological inclination but distinctly left of centre on most substantive policy issues. There is little evidence that a generation of voters reared under New Labour and the coalition has shifted to the right.

Between 2001 and 2009, overall public expenditure in real, that is, inflation-adjusted terms increased by 42%. Health expenditure increased by 75%. All the evidence is that the investment in public services in the 2000s paid off in terms of better health outcomes and exam results and that the poorest families were among the greatest beneficiaries. The median household’s final income (after accounting for taxes, welfare benefits and spending on public services) is now 95% higher than it was in 1997/8.

The minimum wage and tax credits made a tangible difference to people’s lives and Britain remains a country in which a great deal of redistribution takes place. The final income of the poorest 10% of households is three times greater than their market income prior to welfare payments and public service provision. Social attitudes towards gender, homosexuality and race have been transformed in the space of a few generations. Political parties track and respond to changes in public opinion. On average, and once elected, parties keep 90% of their election promises.

None of this means that the Iraq war or the financial crisis were figments of the far left’s imagination. They were grade-one policy disasters. But it is a mistake to think that the history of the past 20 years is one of a remorseless undoing of past political glories and that there is little left now that is worth protecting or about which we might feel proud.

The problem with the left’s miserabilist history is not only that it is wrong but that it risks undermining faith in the very thing – government – in which the left needs to believe. A recurring theme within this history since at least the 1930s is that politicians in general and government ministers in particular care only about getting re-elected, keeping their chauffeur-driven cars and making sure that they have a nice private-sector job to fall back on when it all goes wrong. Politicians are out of touch and often quite dim. The civil service is there to neuter radical ideas. Behind the pantomime of prime minister’s questions, the real levers of power are held by multinational businesses that contribute just enough to party funds to make sure they get the policies they want.

There is a certain sense to rightwing economists and bloggers peddling arguments of this kind. The neoliberal right, after all, believes that the competitive market is good and that the state is bad and that we need more of the former and less of the latter. It makes sense for them to argue that elected politicians are entirely self-interested and invariably incompetent because they want more markets and less government.

But it is troubling to see a similar sounding set of arguments about the failings of government being articulated by the left. The things the left believes in – greater equality, social mobility, regulation of markets for the collective good and the universal provision of public services – don’t happen by accident. They happen because governments do things out of a conviction that some key decisions about how we organise our lives ought to be decided collectively and democratically.

Politics is often shambolic. And politicians, being human, do sometimes have one eye on their own interests. But the left also needs to recognise that government does sometimes work; that policies are sometimes effectively implemented; that business interests do not always get their wicked way; and that politicians do sometimes put the public interest ahead of their own electoral interests and are not, by and large, thieves and liars. And this may sometimes mean saying that governments have, over the past few decades, got some things right. This, it seems to me, is a central component of how centrists view the world.

In a collection of short essays and reminiscences, From the Diary of a Snail, the novelist Günter Grass documents Willy Brandt’s 1969 campaign to become chancellor of Germany as leader of the Social Democratic party. In describing Brandt’s faith in social democrat reformism over revolutionary politics, Grass invokes the image of a snail’s slow progress.

The snail, he writes, “seldom wins and then by the skin of its teeth. It crawls, it goes into hiding but keeps on, putting down its quickly drying track on the historical landscape.” The snail’s slow doggedness is unheroic but it makes a difference.

The centre-left’s progress in Britain has been snail-like. Yes, there have been plenty of setbacks and long periods in which leftwing ideas appear to have been marginalised. But there have also been some notable victories and, looked at over the long haul, the track of centre-left ideas is nevertheless not only visible but occasionally impressive.

Andrew Hindmoor is professor of politics, University of Sheffield and author of What’s Left Now? (OUP)