Dear future leader of the Labour party,

Thank you for taking the time to listen to one of the many Labour candidates who failed to win a seat in the last election. My advice to you is simple: trust the people.

The Conservatives have a long history of putting profit before the British people and their communities. But I worry that for too long Labour hasn’t had a very high opinion of the public either. During the election campaign it too often felt like we were treating voters as if they were needy, greedy or irrelevant; assuming they either needed more tax credits, should be taxed at a higher rate, or else we had very little to say to them.

Like many candidates in marginal seats, I lost track of the number of people who said they would like to vote Labour, but didn’t feel welcome in our party. That applied equally to the working-class man who felt fobbed off by statistics about border guards when he was worried about EU immigration, and to the woman who works long hours in a small business. Of those who said that they would like to vote Labour but had reservations, many said that they weren’t sure what we stood for – or if they could trust us any more.

One family I met on election day has really stuck in my mind. The mother said she was voting Tory because she didn’t like our leader; the father said he was usually Labour but was going to vote Ukip; their son who was just old enough to vote didn’t even want to come downstairs and just shouted that we were “all the same”. That, in a nutshell, is why we lost.

If we want to win again we will have to earn back the trust of families like that. But why should they trust us if they suspect we think they are malicious for considering the Tories, or racist for voting Ukip? We have to trust them before they can trust us.

Ultimately the British people deserve more than an ugly choice between a neoliberal Conservative party deregulating banks, attacking the democratic rights of unions and worshipping the free market, and a Labour party that thinks the state is the answer to everything, from loneliness to the debt crisis. We leave very little space for the contribution from civil society – unions, businesses and religious groups – in solving these problems, which we often seem to refer to as a policy challenge, rather than a national mission with heartfelt purpose. It squeezes out the people who make this country what it is.

We tried embracing the free market unreservedly under Tony Blair, and the whole system came crashing down in 2008.

The answer can’t just be more welfare, as Will Straw, former candidate for Rossendale and Darwen, argues in his chapter of our new Fabian book. Labour tried giving away billions in the 1990s and it didn’t do enough to help. Inequality widened, and anyone who has had to suffer the brutal humiliation of a jobcentre knows the public sector isn’t always a place of compassion. We need something more radical that isn’t lost every time the Tories take power.

But we don’t want neoliberalism either. We tried embracing the free market unreservedly under Tony Blair, and the whole system came crashing down in 2008. The country’s economy became unbalanced and overly dependent on the City of London and financial services. Capital was more rewarded than labour, regions withered and exports and manufacturing suffered. Empowering people through institutions like worker representation on the boards of companies and offering proper vocational education, as in Germany, could make us a stronger nation, and give people an alternative to the Conservative’s low-wage, low-skill economy.

Our country deserves more than a choice between the hard left or the hard right. It needs a party that trusts the people, takes pride in our history and builds a sense of hope and optimism about the future. So please, next leader, never lose your faith in the people of the UK. For it is they, not politicians, who make this country what it is – and who will have the final say over who will become our next prime minister.