THE biggest take-home message from Tuesday’s lacklustre leaders’ debate on ITV was that the Prime Minister Boris Johnson has only one policy: delivering his version of Brexit.

The biggest take-home from yesterday’s Labour manifesto launch was that Jeremy Corbyn is setting the agenda on just about everything else.

Mr Corbyn is not an inspiring speaker. He is a tainted figure, who preaches tolerance but has allowed anti-Semitism to take hold within his party. He is a tribalist who has made Labour centrists feel unwelcome. On foreign policy, he has a proven tendency to allow ideology to cloud good judgment.

In most respects, he is the wrong person to be Prime Minister.

But his vision for Britain is pure poetry.

“This manifesto is the most radical and ambitious plan to transform our country in decades,” said Mr Corbyn, and for once, it was not hyperbole.

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Brexit may have obscured it, but the UK faces three epoch-defining problems – climate change, inequality and productivity – and there’s no way the Tories are going to tackle any of them on the scale required. Labour are determined to take on all three.

The costs of Labour’s manifesto are eye-popping and almost certainly unaffordable, as this column has argued previously. But with both the larger parties abandoning spending constraints and promising a bonanza, the question now arises of how and by whom such large, transformative amounts of cash will best be spent. And Mr Corbyn wins the prize.

The climate emergency has become an emergency because successive governments have failed to take the radical action required.

Labour offer a “green transformation” backed by £250bn and aimed at creating one million green jobs, producing electric cars before other countries steal that nascent market, building wind turbines, planting trees and installing insulation in millions of homes. It is ambitious, it almost certainly won’t work out as advertised – few government policies ever do – but it is a response that recognises the pressing need for fundamental, far-reaching change to the way we live, and tries to bring it about.

An equally bold approach is required to regenerate those vast swathes of the UK that have missed out for decades on the nation’s growing wealth. It is 30 years since the demise of heavy industry in Scotland (as well as Wales, the Midlands and northern England) and millions are still paying the price for it, in poor health, unemployment, low wages and sheer distress. That failure can be weighed in lost potential.

There is an opportunity here to move on at last. Labour are right to see their radical green overhaul of the economy as a chance to spread the benefits to every nation and region, by improving infrastructure, boosting public services and providing free broadband. So used are we to the sight of shuttered empty high streets in former steel towns or mining villages, that it seems like believing in fairies to imagine them bustling once again, but that is the vision on offer here. The reality is that without serious investment and a change in spending priorities, these communities will remain forever marginalised.

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In Scotland, this manifesto has the feel of a Labour fight back. Mr Corbyn is open to another independence referendum in the later years of a Labour government. The Tories howl that Labour are soft on the union.

Well, if the SNP fail to win a majority in 2021, the pressure for one will recede. And if they do win a majority? Then it would be morally untenable for a PM to refuse a referendum. Even the right wing Scottish Secretary Alister Jack accepts that. In fact, as anyone who knows Scottish politics can see clearly, the independence movement has far more to fear from a Corbyn government than a Johnson one.

That is especially true after yesterday’s manifesto launch, which promises £100bn investment in Scotland. A progressive, left-wing and high-spending Labour government in Westminster will have the effect of making the UK union seem more attractive again to swing voters who have been considering independence.

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Money, money, money – it would take baths full of the stuff. The cash would undoubtedly run out. It would be messy and incomplete; promises would be broken. But at least there is a chance that Labour would leave behind a fairer, greener society that has been set on the right course.

Not so the Conservatives. What we’ve seen so far of the Tory offer is best described as Labour-lite: an attempt to steal Labour’s ideas but without the conviction or philosophical underpinning.

Labour’s manifesto turbo-charged the party’s 15 per cent rise in the polls during the 2017 election and a fearful Mr Johnson, the magpie Prime Minister with no vision of his own, is trying to steal their shiny ideas this time around.

But the Tories’ knock-off version of Labour’s plan is not hand-crafted and lovingly designed, it’s a cheap imitation that is headed for post-election landfill – not least because if Mr Johnson wins, the Tory fetish for a hard Brexit will scrunch the British economy into a ball leaving no spare cash for, well, anything.

After nine years in power and a disastrous EU referendum, the Tories have no vision or credo – except, that is, for desiring a hard Brexit like an ascetic desires self-mortification. The true nature of the Johnson Cabinet is hard right, wedded to shredding regulation and leaving Europe at all costs. All this NHS hugging, all these safaris into the working class north, are for show.

On Friday 13 December, if the unreliable Mr Johnson is let back into Downing Street, we can expect his manifesto promises to be filed in the waste paper bin.

Jeremy Corbyn is few people’s idea of an ideal Prime Minister. His referendum pitching a close relationship with Europe versus remain may be sensible enough, but his dismal failure to back remaining in the EU has allowed Boris Johnson to push Britain towards a hard Brexit. He is lagging in the polls and faces an uphill struggle. It’s a good thing he’s so unlikely to win a majority. The Liberal Democrats or the SNP would temper his more ideological obsessions.

But a Labour government right now could set the UK on a different, better course that helps address the country’s most pressing problems, and there might not be another chance.