Labour is like the Titanic after it hit an iceberg — but before actually sinking

CAST your mind back 20 years almost to the day. Tony Blair famously declared ‘a new dawn has broken’ as his Labour Party swept into power in the General Election of May 1997.

His supporters gleefully hoped that his thumping Commons majority of 179 would mean the Conservative Party might never govern Britain again.

in a bid to consolidate this sea-change, Mr Blair sought to engineer an alliance with Paddy Ashdown’s Lib Dems and to turn the 21st century into what he termed the ‘progressive century’ — thus cutting the Tories out of power for ever.

Two decades later, and what a stunning reversal of fortunes!

Mr Blair is one of the most reviled figures in Britain as a result of the iraq war. The Labour Party is seemingly unelectable. indeed, such is its unpopularity that it may disappear as a significant political force altogether.

That is the unequivocal message from yesterday’s local election results.

For Labour, it is much worse than when Michael Foot led it to catastrophe in 1983. To find a comparable situation, we need to look to the Thirties, when Stanley Baldwin’s Tory Party secured 470 seats in the Commons to Labour’s 52.

To understand the full scale of the change, let us consider the results in the bellwether constituency of Nuneaton in the Midlands.

in 1997, it was a safe Labour seat. Two years ago, it had become a Tory marginal. Today, it is true blue Conservative territory — rather like Surrey and Berkshire. This is a phenomenal turnaround.

The change is charted by voting patterns in local elections. Two years ago, in the Nuneaton ward of Bulkington, the Tories and Labour were neck and neck, each with 36 per cent of the votes, with Ukip not far behind them both at 28 per cent.

This week, Ukip decided not to field a candidate and to concentrate its efforts in more winnable areas. This was a wise move in view of the result. The Tories more than doubled their votes — to a stunning 76 per cent. Labour’s share crashed to 24 per cent.

OBVIOUSLY, the Tories scooped much more of Ukip’s 2015 vote than Labour did. Certainly, the collapse of Ukip is one factor behind Labour’s bloodbath in England’s shires.

When the anti-EU party first emerged as a force a decade ago, all political experts (including me) believed that it would take votes from the Tories.

This was partly because of a growing anti-EU mood across the United Kingdom as a whole but also because many traditional Conservatives felt that their party, under new leader David Cameron, was shifting away from traditional Toryism.

But now with Ukip having declined as a political force — albeit after scoring the massive achievement of forcing Mr Cameron to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU — its supporters are now backing Theresa May.

of course, Ukip’s powerful showing in the 2015 General Election was partly due to the fact that hundreds of thousands of traditional Labour folk also agreed with its anti-Brussels message.

But those people have not now reverted to Labour. instead, they have voted Conservative.

This is a truly seismic episode in British political history.

in electoral terms, Ukip has been a transit lounge for disaffected Labour voters shifting allegiance to the Conservatives.

it means that on June 8, Mrs May is likely to win a majority of much more than 100 seats, making her one of the most powerful peacetime British prime ministers — alongside Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

Several profound consequences flow from this. First, Ukip is a spent political force. i predict that many Ukip councillors and activists will join the Tories in the near future. others may withdraw from politics.

Total though the destruction of Ukip may be, its members should not feel too downhearted. The fact is that Ukip was set up with one purpose alone — to take Britain out of the EU. They will soon succeed in that task.

However, for the Labour party, yesterday’s local election results are a disaster.

The party will limp through the next few weeks until the General Election — when i anticipate things will get even worse. Expect an implosion.

in view of this, i would not be surprised if there is a desperate, last- ditch attempt to dislodge Jeremy Corbyn from the leadership over the next few days.

yet, even if such a move were to succeed, it would be a kamikaze act — simply opening the way to a chaotic and bloody civil war which would drive away yet more wouldbe voters.

Without wishing to be overdramatic, i believe that Labour is in a similar position to the Titanic after it hit an iceberg but before actually sinking.

of course, Labour has been a great political party. Even those who disagree with its policies must recognise that it shaped Britain, in many ways for the better, in the 20th century.

it gave a voice to the working classes and the trades unions; it inspired many vital social reforms, including the creation of the Welfare State and the NHS.

The heirs of Keir Hardie will always have an honourable place in British history.

But now it faces extinction as a front-rank political force.

SOME will inevitably blame Mr Corbyn, but that would be unfair. Mr Blair must shoulder huge responsibility — having taken the Labour Party’s traditional working- class roots for granted in search of instant political gain.

Whether it happens in the coming days or the moment that polls close at 10pm on June 8, a brutal internal battle will break out within Labour between those hard-Left Corbynistas and the socalled moderates.

Should Mr Corbyn stay on or one of his acolytes take over, i am certain that a new centre party will emerge.

it would attract men and women from all the current parties: for example, George osborne, Tony Blair, Lord (Peter) Mandelson and Nick Clegg.

Predictably, it will be hailed by anti-Brexit news organisations such as the BBC, the Financial Times and the Guardian as the Messiah of British politics.

in many ways, it will be a repeat of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which broke away from Mr Foot’s unelectable Labour party in the early Eighties and was feted by the chattering classes.

it may thrive longer than the SDP — for, without doubt, the British political system needs a strong opposition.

There is a contemporary precedent for such a new party. it is the one created in France by Emmanuel Macron, who is expected to be voted as his country’s new president tomorrow.

Already, allies of Mr osborne ( whose Evening Standard newspaper this week described Macron as a ‘charismatic centrist who has captivated a continent’) have cast admiring glances across the Channel.

in the meantime, with an opposition flat on its back, Theresa May will hold unassailable power. The privilege of such power must also mean she has the huge responsibility not to exploit it for party- political advantage, but to use it in Britain’s national interest.