Can Labour die?

An essential article by Iain Martin in today’s Telegraph, on a topic that Coffee House will devote more attention to shortly – are Labour on the path to annihilation? On Martin’s account, the picture certainly looks bleak:

“Endangered in England’s largest cities, losers in London, out of power in Scotland and sharing it with the nationalists in Wales, wiped out in the south, on the run in the north-west marginals, under fire in the West Midlands, all but bankrupt and with a collapsing membership: what it to become of Labour?

This is how, if they are not careful, parties die. Extinction is never the result of a single event, rather it happens more slowly, over several decades. A grouping whose leaders and policies once appeared as a fixed point on the landscape, gradually lose definition until virtually no one thinks it is any longer worth paying attention…

…It is in unpicking the Union that Labour has unleashed forces that could, ultimately, bring about its nemesis.