Labour must change its policies or face oblivion

The ‘not me, guv’ rhetoric was like Steven Gerrard blaming the tea lady for a Rangers defeat

After Thursday’s defeat for the Labour Party, you would have thought two of its chief architects might retreat for what’s euphemistically known as a quiet spell of self-reflection.

Not a bit of it. The dust hadn’t settled on the party’s worst drubbing since 1935 and John McDonnell and Unite union leader Len McCluskey were on the offensive with a list of reasons for that abject failure. None, of course, involving them.

Their “not me, guv” rhetoric was like Steven Gerrard blaming the tea lady for a Rangers defeat.

McDonnell, McCluskey, Momentum founder Jon Lansman, their frontman Jeremy Corbyn and their low- calibre outriders knew the dangers of going into a UK General Election with an eccentric leftwing leader offering an uncosted manifesto full of indigestable policy a while back. As far back, in fact, as June 10, 1983. That’s when Corbyn’s linear predecessor Michael Foot presided over a similar fiasco of an election, allowing Margaret Thatcher a landslide victory which had disastrous consequences for working class communities north of Watford.

The fact that so many of those communities were prepared to vote Tory last week underlines the seriousness of the problem facing Labour.

McDonnell confirmed that he’d follow Corbyn out of the Shadow Cabinet yesterday.

It’s a start. But it’s no more than that.

In a UK context, Yvette Cooper looks head and shoulders above most other candidates mooted as potential new leaders.

She’s experienced, smart and untainted by the entire Corbyn project. She also had a great Brexit doing vital work to move a No Deal withdrawal off the table.

Cooper will be opposed on the basis that she is a link back to the Blair years.

This, though, should count as a positive, not a negative.

Cooper would at least be able to explain to the party’s younger members the meaning and significance of actually winning big elections.

In Scotland, Richard Leonard now faces the tricky issue of where to place the party on the constitution.

Yesterday, the momentum was in favour of backing Holyrood’s right to choose when such a vote would take place.

This would hand Nicola Sturgeon greater control of the timetable.

It would, also, however, mean that Scottish Labour would sit nowhere near Boris Johnson and the Tories on the issue.

That would seem like the sensible option. It might save Scottish Labour from oblivion.