Trump’s shock election win has the government feeling nervous. It must remember: bold, fair policies are exactly what the public wants

Those panic alarms in MPs’ welcome-to-Westminster packs may have been eyed nervously by some on the Labour benches in the past week. The shock of Donald Trump’s victory makes many uneasier about the next election, even if they are not exactly panicking. It’s five years before voters pass judgment on Labour’s successes and failures, but talk of a 10-year programme of renewal suddenly feels to them a tad hubristic.

Thundering great damnations against social democrats of the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris type have rained down from all sides. Predictably, the right caricatures them as virtue-signalling liberal elites who lost touch with working-class values, preoccupied as they were with incomprehensible woke identities, sneering at uneducated fools who were tricked by the demagogue Trump. There’s never any shortage of unhelpful blame within Labour’s palisades echoing the charge that it’s out of touch with ordinary people, as Reform threatens many seats. But hey, Labour just won a huge majority with its most working-class frontbench ever. Fascinating though the US election was, there are limited lessons from that alien country. Why trash Harris’s not-bad campaign, or wrongly assume that social-democratic Bidenomics must have been an electoral loser?

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist