The Labour Party is a self-consciously progressive party dominated by highly educated people who believe they understand the world and its problems better than anyone else. Jeremy Corbyn is the distilled essence of that otherworldly arrogance
The 2015 British election was a turning point for the Labour Party from which it is hard to see it recovering in its present form. Moreover, there is no obvious centre-Left success story elsewhere in Europe which might provide a guide and inspiration for a Labour recovery. The temporary advance of harder-Left parties like Syriza and Podemos is unlikely to survive contact with economic realities and, in any case, is just further competition for the moderate Left.
In fact Labour’s defeat—in part at the hands of nationalists and populists of Left and Right—represents for the party an unwelcome Europeanisation of British politics. The old social democratic alliance between blue-collar workers and the non-business professional middle class—what one might call the Hampstead–Humberside alliance—has long since disappeared in continental Europe. The Tony Blair victories of 1997, 2001 and 2005 turn out to have been its last hurrah in Britain.
There is plenty of space for a rooted, well-led, social democratic party in Britain capable of speaking for two-thirds of the country or more, and able to appeal to both aspirational middle- and lower-income voters and those who feel left behind by rapid social change. It is just very hard to see how Labour with its current activists, MPs and leaders could ever be that party. For it is the party’s inability to understand the cultural anxieties of most British voters that lost it the election. Leaving aside the (admittedly large) issue of economic competence and Ed Miliband, it simply had no answer to nationalism in Scotland, UKIP English populism in the Midlands and the North (which gave UKIP nearly 17 per cent of the vote and 44 second places in those areas) and the free-market modernity of southern England.