As I say in the piece, you always require *some* polarisation as a political strategy as you need to divide electorates in way favourable to you. If it was me, I'd have gone for an all out push on public services, which IMO, is what people elect Labour governments for.
I am not going to claim that this is easy or doesn't have drawbacks. It would require some really tricky choices. But public services being better is basically an issue everyone can agree on and the public are more willing to make trade offs than they're stereotyped as IMO.
This is the over-arching lesson to me from the Covid period. Despite it being a breeding ground for a lot of the current craziness, it also illustrated the majority of people were up to engage with trade offs when asked. 1/2
Part of the problem (not just in Labour) is that all sorts of people are willing to assert that we're in a really bad place and need (eg) a tax rise to fix things. But no-one seems willing to take the idea that "we're in big trouble, there's a trade off we have to decide on" to the public. 2/2
I do think the fact that the Dunkirk spirit still has such political pull isn't just about nationalist mythmaking, but also about an idea of shared sacrifice and that this is actually something you can leverage for a lot of necessary change.