What the Left must do now to prevent its obliteration

For the hard Left – and yes, I’m proudly part of it – it’s time to wake up and smell the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign organic Fairtrade coffee. For the second time in four years, a leadership drawn from our side of the party has led Labour to electoral devastation.

Unless we find a way back from that, and to win next time, our vision for Britain faces obliteration as definitive as that witnessed under Thatcherism. It’s a painful undertaking, and it begins with owning the defeat.

The urgent first move is to eradicate anti-Semitism, mainly because that is the right thing to do anyway. But even on the baser level of electoral calculation, it’s costing us seats.

Never again should Labour canvassers feel trepidation when knocking on a north London suburban door to which a mezuzah is nailed.

Then stop stitching up selections, which demoralises activists. But impose rigid quality controls where local parties make the choice, because it’s better than having to disown wrong-’uns in mid campaign.

The everything-but-the-kitchensink manifesto was an unforced error.

The message was too diffuse, too much to take in. You really can have too much of a good socialist thing.

Recognise that the “MSM” is called the mainstream media for a reason. You do not single-handedly offset the impact of the millions of Tory-leaning newspapers sold every day by phoning amateur-hour spin-doctor hot tips to adulatory one-man websites.

One factor dominated everything else. In hindsight, we’d have been better served sticking to the 2017 position of respecting the Brexit result. Ironically, that was probably Jeremy Corbyn’s private judgment as well. Yes, it would have hurt in London and the South. But voter haemorrhage would have been less severe overall.

Disaffection among what New Labour euphemistically dubbed “the heartland vote” hardly commenced under Corbyn, of course. The malaise dates back decades. Scotland looks a lost cause for at least a generation. The red wall may not be so beyond repair, but won’t be rebuilt by London calling to the faraway towns.

Where we should not resile is in justifying Corbyn’s four-year stint as leader. Indeed, if you want to get all Marxist about it, you could even call it historically inevitable. By the 2000s, Labour had moved well to the right of where any left-of-centre party ever has any business being. Without what City pages call a long-overdue market correction, it would likely be languishing with the sort of singledigit poll standings afflicting many continental counterparts. Even after this week’s collapse, its vote share remains higher than under Brown and Miliband.

It’s not Labour’s economic Leftism that is unpopular. If it was, the Tories would not have ditched four decades of orthodoxy and pay lip service to tax-and-spend economics, solely in the name of electoral expediency.

So to paraphrase a popular National Rifle Association bumper sticker, New Labour can have the party back when they pry it from our cold dead hands.

Luckily the hard Left retains sufficient membership support to secure the succession. Rebecca Long-Bailey will likely be designated to carry the flame, but needs to prove she is more than a favourite daughter.

The Right may well stand Jess Phillips, who possesses bucketloads of the charisma Long-Bailey lacks. But some fear her confrontational style makes her too divisive.

An overcrowded field of soft-Lefts, semi-Corbynistas, Brown leftovers and centrists such as Angela Rayner, Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry, Clive Lewis, Yvette Cooper and Lisa Nandy could all make credible unifiers. I’ll reserve judgment until I see the platforms.

David Osland is a former member of the national committee of the Labour Representation Committee and ex-news editor of Tribune

Avocal Corbyn cheerleader ventured into a council estate in Worksop, Notts, the former coal-mining town at the centre of the Bassetlaw constituency, seeking votes. On his fleeting sojourn from his expensive converted farmhouse opposite his quaint village church, he proceeded to pursue a miner’s widow, making her way to the shops with the aid of her Zimmer frame, lambasting her for her refusal to vote Labour because of Jeremy Corbyn.

The arrogance and detachment of Corbyn’s middle-class fan club was a factor in every seat lost. And they were so out with the fairies that in Bassetlaw they predicted a 1,200 Labour majority on the eve of the election.

It is 95 years since Bassetlaw last elected a Conservative MP. This May Labour posted its best election results in a century, solidly behind my stance of getting on with Brexit, winning three wards for the first time.

Then the Corbyn cult intervened, hosting its own secret hustings locally and having the Momentum-controlled Labour national executive excluding local councillors from standing, and then removing the candidate chosen