On Friday morning, I watched my son’s school play. It was a joyously chaotic mix of mythology, mathematics and a walk-on part by “astronaut Tim Peake”. But all I could feel was sadness – about how this Year 3 was not going to grow up enjoying the possibilities my generation has enjoyed as part of the European Union. They face a Europe of work permits and suspicion, cultural disconnect and denied opportunities.

And then I thought of the conversation I had with a teacher in Stoke-on-Trent, planning to vote Leave. She was a Labour supporter who had given her career to educating some of the least advantaged. But she was upset at how growing levels of immigration had put pressures on school budgets and led to fewer resources for children. She thought the poorest in society were being adversely affected by our membership of the EU and she wanted out.

There are no easy answers to this referendum result – and many of the 52% who voted Leave had fair cause. The citizens of Sunderland, Lincolnshire and Wrexham have felt the sharp end of globalisation without adequate compensation for too long.

Since 2003, their wages have slipped, towns changed, industry departed. And they did not think the Labour party had shown nearly enough appreciation for their loss. In the brutal judgment of Nigel Farage: “The election (sic) was won in the Midlands and the north and it was the old Labour vote that came to us.”

By contrast, the cosmopolitan, more highly skilled, Labour-voting Remain residents of Brighton, Bristol and London – and those, let’s not forget, of Liverpool and Manchester – are now furious at Britain cutting itself off from the continent; rightly, they do not think the leadership campaigned with any of the urgency required to save our place in Europe. Across age, class, geography and educational background, this referendum has cut to the core of the party and, in the greatest act of national self-harm since Suez, the leadership has been found wanting. So as we face the prospect of a Tory-driven Brexit and another general election, our experiment with Corbynism has to end. If Labour members care about Labour voters, we need to do something about the Labour leader.

Our communities are going to be hit first and worst from the coming EU retreat and we need a leader with the strategic insight and tactical nous to ensure Labour values are protected in the Tory renegotiation. Just as the late John Smith ripped the Tories apart over the Maastricht treaty, Labour has to take a scalpel to the Brexit imbroglio of lies over immigration, NHS funding and the single market.

Jeremy is not that leader. The shadow cabinet needs to act or MPs will. As one of the many angry emails I have received from a Labour member puts it: “The economic repercussions of leaving the EU will lead to many more years of austerity and job losses, the very thing the Labour party should have been resisting… Effective Labour leadership would surely have swayed public opinion by the few percent required. I do not think Corbyn is a bad person, but he has proved utterly ineffectual.”

This catastrophe is not all of his making. The referendum exposed with terrifying clarity tensions within the Labour movement that have built up over the last decade. First of all, the growing divide between England and Scotland, which hurt Labour as the only credible unionist party. The aftermath of the 2014 Scottish referendum and then general election saw Labour punished as “red Tories” for lacking a credible enough patriotic case north of the Tweed. Thursday’s poll exacerbated the divide as Scotland voted in, England out and left Labour in the middle.

But a strong sense of Englishness was equally at play in this campaign. This has been coming for years, as more and more people identify themselves as English rather than British and place greater stress on their cultural identity. These socially conservative, working-class voters feel the Labour party’s cosmopolitan, liberal ethos is not for them and used this referendum to underline their frustration. The rejection of the EU in Labour heartlands was the latest indication of a growing values divide between membership and voters. In the self-reinforcing Labour Twitter-sphere, the case for Europe was obvious; on the tight-knit terraces and postwar housing estates, it was never a “slam dunk”.

For many traditional Labour sympathisers, what brought together the economic discontent, cultural anxiety and party disconnect was immigration. It was the touchstone for a broader series of changes in the labour market and income distribution – agency work, zero-hours contracts, manufacturing decline – which have undermined employment and pay.

In the words of the Unite general secretary, Len McCluskey, “In the past 10 years, there has been a gigantic experiment at the expense of ordinary workers… The result has been sustained pressure on living standards and a systematic attempt to hold down wages and cut the costs of social provision for working people.” The unequal effects of globalisation and “social dumping” in post-industrial communities topped the ballot last Thursday.

Unfortunately, Corbyn’s answer to this anger was, first of all, to frame the question of immigration within a lineage of anti-fascist struggle stretching back to Cable Street. Then to muse on how there could be no upper limit on inward migration and, after all, he had no problem if there were more Spanish or French nurses than British ones. That might be the consensus in north London, but in the north of England, Labour voters take a different view. As his own policy adviser, Paul Mason, rightly puts it: “Labour movement activists have to stop dodging working-class objections to low-wage inward migration or assuming it can all be resolved by an appeal to anti-racism.”

But Corbyn’s real crime during the campaign was a failure to insert Labour values about workers’ rights and European solidarity into the debate. His absence of leadership gave space to Project Fear and a narrow, econometric case for Europe that failed to stir Labour voters.

Truth be told, he was never that interested in keeping Britain in Europe and the public clocked it: on the streets of Stoke-on-Trent, Labour voters kept on asking just what the party’s position was. As we now face the prospect of a Boris Johnson-led scuttle, bankrolled by Tory donors desperate to dismantle labour protection and offshore industry, we cannot have those Labour values missing in action again.

Yet my real anger is at the hideous cynicism of Boris Johnson, Daniel Hannan and Vote Leave.

“Take Control” as a slogan is appealing for those who don’t have much of it. It speaks to a nostalgic idea of a time, pre-1975, when governments by and large did have control over the forces that shaped their citizens’ lives. That is simply not the world we live in anymore and mainstream politicians, who know this, implicitly collude in it by playing up to a fantasy notion of themselves as politicians: “Vote for me and I will make it all better.”

I don’t think a smaller, poorer England is going to make things better for the prospects of my son’s Year 3 or the struggling teacher in Stoke. In fact, we are now more at risk from the whims of global capital and multinational corporations than we were last week.

So my belief that we need a new leader is not rooted in Westminster but on the streets of Stoke-on-Trent. This is the deepest peacetime crisis in our country for decades and our party cannot afford to continue with self-indulgence.

We need a leader who can hold Boris Johnson to account, stand up for Labour voters and be ready to walk through the door of Downing Street in as little as a year’s time.

The British people have been sold a pup and now we need the Labour lion to roar.

Tristram Hunt is MP for Stoke-on-Trent