The British Labour party is on the verge of selecting as its next leader a Marx-quoting, industry-nationalizing, anti-American socialist – and all hell is starting to break loose in the dissenting ranks. Today, Tony Blair takes to the Guardian to warn that if Jeremy Corbyn is indeed chosen, the party faces political “annihilation”:

The Labour party is in danger more mortal today than at any point in the over 100 years of its existence. I say this as someone who led the party for 13 years and has been a member for more than 40. The leadership election has turned into something far more significant than who is the next leader. It is now about whether Labour remains a party of government.

Blair, a longstanding modernizing force within the party does not pull his punches:

The party is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched, over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below. This is not a moment to refrain from disturbing the serenity of the walk on the basis it causes “disunity”. It is a moment for a rugby tackle if that were possible.

Indeed:

If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader it won’t be a defeat like 1983 or 2015 at the next election. It will mean rout, possibly annihilation. If he wins the leadership, the public will at first be amused, bemused and even intrigued. But as the years roll on, as Tory policies bite and the need for an effective opposition mounts – and oppositions are only effective if they stand a hope of winning – the public mood will turn to anger. They will seek to punish us. They will see themselves as victims not only of the Tory government but of our self-indulgence.

Blair’s central argument is essentially the same one he made back in the 1990s, when he sought to take Labour out of the political wilderness and back into power:

Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t offer anything new. This is literally the most laughable of all the propositions advanced by his camp. Those of us who lived through the turmoil of the 80s know every line of this script. These are policies from the past that were rejected not because they were too principled, but because a majority of the British people thought they didn’t work. And by the way, they were rejected by electorates round the world for the same reasons.

He has a point. The Labour party moved sharply leftward at the last election, and it lost, which, in hindsight, wasn’t a great surprise. Since 1975, Labour has been roundly beaten each and every time it has done anything other than present a Conservative-lite agenda. Indeed, in the last forty years, the party has won only three elections — all, of course, under Tony Blair’s leadership. As far as I can tell, Jeremy Corbyn would be the most overly socialistic Labour leader since the dark days of Michael Foot, whose manifesto for the 1983 election was described as “the longest suicide note in history.” David Cameron must think it’s his birthday.