The Labour leadership election has been parochial. There has been much talk of the party’s collapse in Scotland and of how Labour has given the impression of being “an elitist Westminster think tank”, as Andy Burnham, the favourite, has repeatedly bemoaned. This is all well and good, but Labour’s decline is much better understood not as something isolated but as part of a broader trend. For in Europe and throughout the west, social democracy is in crisis or retreat. The centre left is locked out of power in parliamentary systems in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and, of course, the United Kingdom. On the Continent, the experience is the same for the centre left in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Hungary and now also Denmark, following the defeat of the centre-left bloc, which had been led by Helle Thorning-Schmidt.
The British left once looked to Scandinavia for inspiration and guidance. “If you want the American dream – go to Finland,” Ed Miliband observed. Yet Finland turfed out its centre-left coalition two months ago; three of the four Nordic countries now face being run by governments of the right. Only in Sweden is the centre left in power.
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