Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer

THERE is a conference speech clip which loyalist Labour members like to share every now and again: the one where Gordon Brown reels off the list of achievements he felt his party had made in government.

With each reform, the applause for the then prime minister gets louder.

Despite 13 years in power, it was always a puzzle then why the party could not put ending the long wait for same-sex marriage onto that list. It was the Liberal Democrats in the coalition government who raced in to take the credit for pushing it through the parliamentary agenda.

Brown, before, had mumbled something about how it was all too “intimately bound up with questions of religious freedom”, but time has shown that doesn’t really wash. People with a religious conviction on the issue cannot be allowed to dictate to wider society rules which leave others feeling excluded.

Campaigners were frustrated with New Labour and look! – 10 years on – the world has not collapsed because two people of the same sex get married in Camden Town Hall every weekend.

We celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first marriages in today’s issue as a testament to it being the right thing do.

Brown should have shown more energy on the matter and too often he was timid as a leader. Perhaps it was because he felt insecure as the public had never voted him into Number 10 – that lack of contract is where Rishi Sunak finds himself in now and almost certainly faces a similar fate.

Labour appear on the brink of returning to power and could possibly have the mandate of a large majority – but the party shows similar nervousness.

Its MPs, candidates and supporters must see that an incoming administration cannot simply nibble around the edges, and yet we are encouraged to wait patiently for big policy announcements.

Plans that were previously outlined have been ripped up or watered down. Every day in their surgeries and on the doorstep they must see stark evidence of inequality, but the election talk so far has centred on why the Tories have been chaotic at the wheel rather than what their Labour replacements would actually do to improve the everyday life of those locked into the reality of the cost of living crisis.

With so much to repair and improve, only big and bold action will do. There cannot be fear of being called woke or what a commentator on GB News or the Daily Mail might say. Worry must not suffocate ambition.

This election year should be a time when people go to the polling booths voting for something they want, rather than simply something they do not.

The opportunity is there. We are all ears.