How Labour wins

Labour can win the next election. The winds that blew apart their electoral coalition in 2019 can change in their favour; Brexit has destroyed old certainties but also made anything possible. The party needs first to analyse honestly what went wrong and then conjure up a new, yet old-fashioned progressivism to fix it.

The most popular narrative is that Labour was undone by a mix of Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit: Corbyn was too radical and inept; Brexit drove the patriotic working-class into the arms of BoJo and the populist Right. 

At this week’s conference, this story will be endorsed by several factions. The small Blue Labour tendency, which argues that Labour’s chief problem is its cultural liberalism: embrace community and patriotism and the workers can be enticed back. The bigger neo-Blairite group, which believes New Labour had the right mix of common sense and aspiration to dominate the centre. And the resurgent soft-Left, largely behind Sir Keir Starmer, which wants to break from New Labour but seek reconciliation with the working-class. 

It is widely agreed that Labour cannot form a government unless it wins back seats like Hartlepool, lost to the Tories in a by-election last May, the first time since its creation.