If Labour is to recover from its electoral defeat in December, it needs an agonising reappraisal such as was offered by the party’s leader Hugh Gaitskell in 1959 after three election defeats and by Tony Blair in 1994 after four. That can only be done by someone not complicit in the Jeremy Corbyn regime. For the fundamental cause of Labour’s defeat was Corbyn and Corbynism.
“The first thing that must strike any outside observer,” George Orwell wrote in 1937, “is that socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class.” The same was true this time around: Corbynite socialism appealed more to graduates than the working class. Writing in the New Statesman in 2017, John Gray noticed that Labour represented a form of “populism for the middle classes”, and appealed less to the downtrodden than to “the material and psychological needs of the relatively affluent and the well-heeled”.
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