Will Labour Learn Its Lesson?

After their biggest electoral landslide since Margaret Thatcher, the Tories, under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, held a victory rally heralding the arrival of “The People’s Government.”

“To all those who voted for us, for the first time,” Johnson said on the steps of 10 Downing Street, “[to] all those whose pencils may have wavered over the ballot and who heard the voices of their parents and grandparents whispering anxiously in their ears, I say thank you for the trust you have placed in us and in me and we will work round the clock to repay your trust and to deliver on your priorities.”

He was referring to the fact that the Conservatives had managed to do what was previously thought to be impossible — break through Labour’s “Red Wall” of working-class constituencies. In part, this was achieved through Johnson’s decisive message (“Get Brexit Done”) and his populist agenda (a promised end to austerity, significant increases in public spending, investment in the National Health Service and in law enforcement). But it was also an abysmal failure on Labour’s part.

The former Labour leader Tony Blair, responsible for the era known as “New Labour,” in which the party pivoted to the center and enjoyed great electoral success, said that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn had pursued “a path of almost comic indecision” over Brexit that had “alienated both sides of the debate.” Ignoring the fact that Blair’s own political brand is in tatters, this was a commonsense observation to anyone paying attention.

Or, at least, to anyone both paying attention and sane of mind. The “Corbynistas” — Corbyn’s fan club of young, university-educated socialists — take a different view.  “It’s a myth that Labour has lost the working class,” one 20-something activist wrote in The Guardian. She went on to argue that since “81% of graduates will spend 30 years of their working lives with tuition debt hanging over their heads,” as well as enduring other economic uncertainties, they, too, should be considered working class.

This is unconvincing on its face. The perfect symbol of millennial brattishness was provided in a viral video clip that made the rounds during the campaign. In it, a young Labour activist, wearing a “f*** Boris” t-shirt, told cameras that “I wish him [Boris Johnson] a horrible death . . . because he’s f***ing everything up for people my age, our future. I plan to work in the National Health Service. I plan to be a doctor. I plan to actually care about people.” She went on to say: “To see working-class people caring about Boris Johnson — they’re shooting themselves in the face.”

Unfortunately for Labour, such sentiment is not only prevalent among grassroots radicals. For instance, after the election, Claudia Webbe, a newly elected Labour MP and former adviser to Ken Livingstone, said on the Today Programme that, despite evidence to the contrary, Labour’s policies were popular. When the interviewer challenged this assertion, reminding her that, in fact, Labour had just endured its worst electoral defeat since 1935, she sidestepped this point and blamed “mass media and newspaper corporations” for influencing the electorate.

The future of the Labour party depends wholly on its capacity for introspection and insight. Corbyn has indicated that he intends to stand down, and Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, was among the first to put herself forward to take her place, which is a start. In a post-election essay for The Guardian, Thornberry made clear that she understood the biggest reason for Labour’s loss, arguing the party should have foreseen that Johnson would turn the election into a referendum on Brexit, and thus refused to agree to it in the first place:

People can argue that our position should have been more pro-leave or more pro-remain, but the reality is we should never have allowed a Brexit election, which was Johnson’s obvious strategic goal from the moment he took office.

But this election was about far more than Brexit. It was about an out-of-touch elite that continually showed contempt for the majority of the British public. And reckoning with that problem must be the top priority of whoever replaces Corbyn.