Shortly after the general election I wrote an article on this site about how Labour could win again. I was strangely optimistic. 2015 was bad but providing Labour learned the right lessons from defeat, victory in 2020 was possible. After all, the Conservative majority is small. The government has already abandoned plans to scrap the Human Rights Act and the Fox Hunting ban as a result. As long as Labour met its need to re-establish fiscal credibility head on and left no stone unturned in its bid to reconnect with the public a comeback was possible. It still is.
However, right now, all the signs are that the party seems determined to learn entirely the wrong lessons from its defeat in May. Rather than reach out to where the public is, many members have decided that, in the name of ‘differentiation,’ the old ways of unabashed socialism were right all along. Labour doesn’t need a new script, it should never have deviated so far from the old one. The answer lies in renationalising the railways, scrapping tuition fees (and presumably Trident) and completely rejecting anything that can be remotely labelled ‘austerity’.
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