The Labour Party’s long road back

8 weeks after suffering its worst general election result for 84 years, Britain’s Labour Party continues to get the pieces. While Boris Johnson’s Conservatives govern with an 80-seat majority inside your home of Commons, Labour is simultaneously reflecting on its thrashing and electing a successor to outgoing leader Jeremy Corbyn.

This week saw the publication by Lord Ashcroft - a Conservative peer but whose research is generally accepted as nonpartisan - of a written report into Labour’s defeat. The report highlighted numerous conditions that doomed Labour, including Corbyn’s leadership, the flip-flopping over Brexit, a domestic platform that wasn’t seen as credible and obsession with fringe liberal issues. However the common theme throughout was the party’s failure to listen.

What might the street back to power appear to be? The initial thing Labour obviously needs is a change at the top, and it’s currently in the process of electing new leadership. The contenders are Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer, Shadow Business Secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey, Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry and the former Shadow Energy Secretary Lisa Nandy.

The contest has been very much pitched left, which dominates the party membership. It has certainly been the case with front-runner Starmer’s bid, which includes ended up being less moderate than some had expected. Long-Bailey is called the “continuity Corbyn” candidate, though without the historical baggage. Nandy’s pitch is centered around bridge-building to the lost voters, with a relentless give attention to towns. Thornberry is undoubtedly a strong performer in the House of Commons but is struggling to attract much support, and may struggle even to make the ballot.

This raises the question of if the right debates are occurring. One problem highlighted by the Ashcroft report may be the gulf between your general electorate and the Labour membership that chooses the first choice, even with many new members prior to the leadership vote potentially narrowing the gap.

But for now it seems problematic for any candidate to transport both party and the united states. (While the Tory Party membership, which chose Boris Johnson last summer, was also a little subset of Conservative voters, it was ruthlessly focused on deciding on a candidate with the capacity of winning office.) At least, the new leader will have to pour a lot of cool water on the Corbynites within the party, just as Neil Kinnock did in the 1980s after Labour was crushed by Margaret Thatcher.

Secondly, Labour must stop ducking the difficult conversations. The time of reflection that Jeremy Corbyn called for when he announced his resignation as the votes were being counted has often seemed similar to an interval of deflection, with Corbynites blaming almost anything and everyone besides their helmsman.

This includes talking about the cultural divide between where much of the existing Labour Party sits and where a lot of its lost voters sit. It is invariably more comfortable for those on the left to attribute Brexit and the election leads to economical factors - yet they are clearly not the key drivers of either result.

Understanding the scale and factors behind the election defeat in full is obviously painful for a party in this position. Nonetheless it is necessary. So aside from the debate around what social democracy should mean in today's post-industrial economy, there are also debates to be had about reconnecting with lost voters, a lot of whom have very different values to the party they once considered theirs.

Thirdly, Labour must stop finding persons to antagonize. This consists of its flip-flopping over Brexit, which upset both supporters and opponents of the U.K.’s departure from the EU. Brits could be divided, nonetheless they largely decided on when it came to disliking Labour’s policy.

In addition, it encompasses the party’s perceived obsession with fringe issues, which has often done it more harm than good. A conference motion critical of the Indian government over Kashmir provoked a backlash among a number of the Indian diaspora in Britain, to no apparent upside. The Israel-Palestine debate could be of huge interest to Labour members, but is hardly the talk of the city in the rustbelt districts that turned so decisively against Labour in December.

The road is obviously long - after 1983 it took 14 years before Tony Blair finally took Labour back to power. The challenges are arguably greater now - the hard left is more in charge of party structures, the battle is on multiple fronts against the Conservatives in England and Wales and against the Scottish National Party in Scotland, and the challenges go well beyond policy into more awkward, cultural issues.

But additionally, there are potential opportunities. The next thing of Brexit could fail, the economy could go stutter, among other things. Labour should be prepared to seize any which come along.

Singh runs Number Cruncher Politics, a nonpartisan polling and elections site that predicted the 2015 U.K. election polling failure.