I’ve seen despair at the Labour conference, but Starmer’s battle for Britain’s soul is one he can still win | Polly Toynbee

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The shock of falling out of the sky faster than any previous government has been a sickening sensation for the assembled MPs and councillors here at Labour conference. Just one year, and already close to crashing. The question is whether Labour’s leader, chancellor and cabinet can tug open enough parachutes to prevent calamity. But the next election is aeons away: only five years ago, Boris Johnson was king of the world, due for another 10 years in No 10. Things go faster, up and down, in this dizzying era. The local elections next May are approached with dread: for many in Labour there is expectation of a massive loss of seats, and the once unthinkable loss of the Senedd in Wales.

Arriving here, graveyard humour echoed around halls and corridors. “Welcome to the walking dead,” one new MP murmured to me. The newbies are the most “frit”, many with tiny majorities, always at risk of just one term on the green benches. But Keir Starmer’s sudden assault on Faragism sent a bolt of electricity through glum delegates. His “battle for the soul of the nation” has raised hope. (Battle and soul were lacking until now.) Gloves off, with Reform UK a terrifying 10 points ahead, he has started to throw off facing-both-ways caution. This marks a turning point, supporters hope. For the party that championed race discrimination laws, calling out a “racist” policy as “immoral” is compulsory, with vicious abuse on the rise again.

Starmer has amends to make for his “island of strangers” speech. He apologised, but its effect, says Prof Rob Ford, was that it “increased the salience of immigration and decreased the Labour vote without gaining any voters back from Reform”. Ford writes this week that Farage’s plan to abolish indefinite leave to remain and deport people working in the UK legally for years will backfire: polling finds it deeply unpopular. Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, should be wary of following Reform far down that path. Prof Sir John Curtice, an editor of the British Social Attitudes survey, has warned Starmer to stop chasing Reform voters: they’ve gone. Labour is losing many times more voters to the left than to Farage.

Beyond self-interest, an authentic disgust spurs Starmer to confront the enemy at the gates. Rachel Reeves in today’s speech called Reform “the single greatest threat to our way of life and to the living standards of working people”. At last, here’s the clarion warning that Farage is a far greater threat than Oswald Mosley, who never came so close to power. Labour will keep sounding that klaxon from now on. Reeves will be summoning business to join this battle: those industry leaders who made the error of keeping their heads down in cowardice over Brexit have paid a heavy price in lost trade and GDP. They know a Reform government would sink the country, break its existing EU deals and make us a pariah for investment and everything else. They must speak up now. Labour needs wit and mockery too, against the faux-patriotism of pro-Trump, pro-Putin Farage. I first heard the migrants-eat-our-swans myth 30 years ago. The royal parks always exploded it.

This spirit of alarm has the power to galvanise depressed Labour troops and maybe erstwhile voters. Perversely, Andy Burnham’s brash shadow coup may also help the Labour leadership. While his path to actual power looks tortuously near-impossible, his influence is felt around this conference. He says, mostly, what party members think, as his protege Lucy Powell’s increasing lead in the deputy leadership polling shows. At his speech at the proportional representation rally on Sunday, I watched Burnham show them how to do it, thumping out popular tunes, daring the cabinet to follow him. My guess is that they will. He has given them a kicking and a reminder that a party at near-rock bottom (it could get worse) has little to lose but its nerve. On electoral reform, Burnham hammers out the clear and present danger that the next election can be won again on a small minority of votes: he calls for a national commission and a manifesto commitment to introduce proportion representation in the next parliament. Personally, I’d do it now, before it’s too late.

But Burnham’s bad blunder on refusing to be “in hock to the bond markets” reveals a deep vulnerability. Liz Truss’s crash-test dummy demonstration showed where that can lead. Of course Labour people want Margaret Thatcher’s disastrous 1980s privatisations reversed, as he pledges, but where’s his money to buy energy and water companies, or reclaim the 2m council homes calamitously sold off? Plenty here may wish they had a different leader, but don’t relish behaving like the Tories: Starmer took over as the sixth prime minister in eight years. Given the extreme impatience of an electorate that seems to expect a Deliveroo government dispensing next-day Amazon parcels of shiny new public services, the chances are a new leader of any party would plummet in no time too, facing all the same intractables that Reeves will struggle with in her budget.

Wise pollsters, such as YouGov’s Patrick English, say people only confront a straight choice as elections approach. Currently the left block, if willing to vote tactically, would beat the right block. A YouGov poll in March suggested some Tories would hold their noses and vote Labour if that was the only choice against Farage in their constituency. Ditto some Labour voters would vote Tory in seats where that was the only serious challenge to Reform.

English was speaking at a Best for Britain fringe event that was filled with longing for Labour to break its Brexit omertà. Time to call “patriot” Farage out on the damage he did to Britain. The act of bravery in calling out Farage’s “racist” policy could lead Starmer to many more, as he finds the sky doesn’t fall in.

(He could start by revoking the absurd ban on Palestine Action: criminal damage is not terrorism. Dozens of their alleged protesters were arrested outside the fence.)

Labour wants to write off its first year as a throat-clearing for better to come. Groundwork has been done: huge investment in green and nuclear energy, in housing, in health, transport and defence. But it takes time to propel the UK to energy self-sufficiency, to see those 12 new towns rise up, to get every “neet” youth into a guaranteed job, to cut child poverty, let alone for people to see and feel change. Starmer will only earn that time by stepping up his battle for the soul on every front. Conferences only secure a few minutes on the news, but they can reset the direction of a party. This one needs to.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist