Few long-suffering Northern Rail passengers will mourn the news that it has been taken into public ownership. The company has a woeful record of delays, cancellations and quality of service. Nationalisation means the government can chuck money at the problem, as it undoubtedly will.

The fact that state control of Northern Rail is seen as a common-sense solution tells us something: Britain has moved to the left on the economy in recent years. There is no appetite for austerity; voters want higher NHS spending; polls show that support for the nationalisation of rail and public utilities stretches across the political spectrum.

The drift to the left is logical. Real wages – pay adjusted for inflation – are still lower than they were before the financial crisis. Use of food banks has ballooned. Voters are worried about inequality, the shabby state of the public realm and the future of the planet. Taking the axe to the budget deficit – the central pillar of economic strategy during David Cameron’s premiership – was supposed to instil confidence and unleash a wave of private-sector investment. It was always a dumb idea, and so it has proved. The 2010s will go down as a lost decade for Britain, as for many other countries.

Boris Johnson has sensed the way the wind is blowing and tacked accordingly. Since becoming prime minister he has announced the biggest increase in public spending in more than 15 years, abandoned a planned cut in corporation tax, raised the minimum wage, promised a budget that will boost spending on public infrastructure projects and nationalised Northern Rail. Ministers are fully signed up to the idea that more needs to be done to tackle the climate crisis and are aware of how high the stakes are at the COP26 conference being held in Glasgow at the end of the year. If, as some of Johnson’s critics say, this is the most rightwing government in history, it has a strange way of showing it. The above measures would be supported by those on the left if it was a Labour government responsible for them.

Historically, there are plenty of precedents for what Johnson is doing. Neville Chamberlain favoured an interventionist industrial policy in the 1930s; the Churchill government of 1951-5 did not seek to roll back Clement Attlee’s welfare state reforms, and accelerated the pace of council house building; Ted Heath’s flirtation with liberalism in the early 1970s proved brief and he soon reverted to the postwar Keynesian orthodoxy. Over the years, Conservative governments have tended to be pragmatic rather than ideological, which helps explain why they have been in power for so much of the past two centuries. Margaret Thatcher’s free-market zealotry was the exception, not the norm.

It is worth the left reflecting on this as it conducts a postmortem examination on last month’s disastrous general election result, because in theory conditions could hardly have been more favourable for Labour. It was not simply that voters have had a bellyful of austerity or that living standards have stagnated. It was the fear among young people that they would never get a foot on the housing ladder, the incompetence and brutality of universal credit, the insecurity generated by a casualised labour market. This was an election fought against the backdrop of the IMF calling for action to tackle inequality and the European Central Bank urging countries to boost public spending in order to boost growth. Yet Labour went down to its biggest defeat since 1935.

For those on the left who don’t want to think too hard, the easiest thing to do is assume that Johnson is simply a neoliberal wolf in one nation Tory clothing. Voters in the Midlands and the north of England, it is said, will soon find out that Johnson is all talk and no delivery. Once they discover that nothing has changed they will return to the warm embrace of Labour at the next election.

There is a grain of truth in this. Some of the government’s announcements – reopening two rail lines closed as a result of the Beeching cuts, for example – are more spin than substance. The swing to the left has not included any change of stance on welfare benefits or any admission that austerity targeted the wrong people. This omission stands out because, to a large extent, Johnson’s economic policy amounts to a mea culpa for the litany of mistakes made earlier in the 2010s.

As such, the good news for Labour is that in the past five years it has shifted the dial on the economy to the point where the Tories have felt the need to nick its policies. The bad news is that voters found the Tory offer more attractive, and the left needs to think long and hard about the reasons for that. One explanation is that the public has shifted leftwards on the economy, but not nearly as far as Labour thinks it has. In the seats Labour lost, voters wanted more than a modest amount of state intervention in the economy; they also wanted a government that was going to deliver Brexit. To that extent, the Labour manifesto in 2017 – which was less radical, less gimmicky and promised to honour the referendum result – was closer to the political centre of gravity in large chunks of the country.

Labour now has many years to contemplate what went wrong. It can spend that time assuming that it will return smoothly to power once the public realises Johnson is a conman. Or it can get out from under the comfort blanket and wake up to the much grimmer possibility that he means what he says.

• Larry Elliott is the Guardian’s economics editor