There is no future for the Left until the Labour Party accepts that it’s finished

The writing is on the wall for Labour, said David Miliband on Friday. It was a strong image, drawn from the Book of Daniel. The writing on the wall prophesied the end of the Chaldean dynasty, a prophecy that was realised almost immediately: “In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain. And Darius the Median took the kingdom.”

Will Labour be similarly supplanted? Not so abruptly, perhaps. There will doubtless still be something calling itself the Labour Party for years to come, just as there are still an SDP and a Liberal Party descended from the factions that refused to support the 1988 merger. But might we look back on the period from 1923 to 2019 as the Labour era – the time when that party was the chief force on the centre-Left?

As I write, Labour is 15 points behind in the opinion polls. If anything, that figure flatters it. Labour has lost Scotland, and is slipping across the North of England and the Midlands. It is making a small comeback in the South East; but first-past-the-post means that it can pick up many more votes in the Home Counties without winning seats.

In one sense, Sir Keir Starmer has been unlucky. His leadership has been dominated by the pandemic – a circumstance almost guaranteed to favour an incumbent government. When that government is firehosing money about the way this one is, it becomes impossible to argue that it should spend and borrow even more.

The lockdowns changed the fiscal terms of trade: the PM went from “Brexity Hezza” to “Brexity Jezza”, forcing Labour off economics and on to its weakest ground, the culture war. A party that is seen as unpatriotic, anti-police, obsessed with identity politics and iffy about the Armed Forces will struggle everywhere except in university towns.

But Sir Keir’s problems run deeper than that. In the current issue of the New Statesman, Tony Blair observes that traditional parties of the Left are in retreat across the world, victims of technological change. He is right, and it is worth spelling out why.

I don’t expect my children to have “a job” in the sense that we understood that word in the twentieth century.

They are likely to go through life freelancing and constantly reskilling. In such a world, parties linked to industrialised workforces and trade unions are lumbering mammoths. Socialist parties have been hammered in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and most of post-Communist Europe. They cling on at the Continent’s edges – in Sweden, Denmark, Portugal and Malta – but, elsewhere, they have been displaced, sometimes by parties that lean Left on economics but Right on culture, sometimes by Greens, sometimes by populist radicals.

Blair glimpses the vastness of the crisis. Labour, he argues, “needs total deconstruction and reconstruction”. But what party wants to hear that message? Especially from Blair, for whom many Labour activists reserve a loathing deeper than anything they feel towards the Tories. In the 45 years since Jim Callaghan took over, there have been eight Labour leaders. Seven of them failed to win a single general election. But if you think that fact earns Blair a sympathetic hearing in the party he used to lead, think again.

Labour, as currently constituted, cannot win a majority. Its structures are too ungainly, its nostrums too old, its activists too angry, its mood too sour. In Britain, as in any country, there is a chunk of the electorate in the market for a Left-of-centre party. But the language of picket lines is as foreign to that electorate as the language of “defund the police”.

Labour’s engines can’t be repaired, but neither does anyone seem ready to cannibalise its parts and build something new. And so it lies there, wrecked and rusting, blocking the tracks and preventing the emergence of an alternative party. There was something almost pitiful about the way it banged on about imagined sleaze while the PM got on with leading the country through the vaccination programme. It started with wallpaper for Boris. It ended with curtains for Keir.