Who is popular today?

The party’s traditional coalition of voters has collapsed. A comeback is only possible if it develops a new, more subtle politics of place
After the Labour party’s disastrous election defeat in 1983, at the hands of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, Tony Benn famously found a silver lining in the almost unbroken cloud of gloom. Writing in this newspaper, Mr Benn noted that though Labour had been routed, winning only 27.6% of the vote, millions of people had nevertheless voted for an authentically socialist manifesto. This time round, after Labour’s worst performance at a general election since 1935, there is no dodging the scale of the catastrophe. Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, rightly admitted that last Thursday’s poll was a “disaster”.
This was a defeat like no other that Labour has suffered in its 119-year history. The party haemorrhaged seats in the Midlands and north, which have been the bedrocks of its traditional support. The morning after the election, Michael Gove (inaccurately) boasted that, for the first time, the Durham Miners’ Gala and the Notting Hill carnival would both take place in constituencies held by Conservatives. That was a gleeful swipe at Labour’s very sense of itself as an institution, founded in 1900, to represent the interests of the working class in the coalfields and factory towns that drove the industrial revolution. Continue reading...