Labour is following in the doomed footsteps of the French left

The left no longer exists as a coherent political force in France. Embarrassed in the 2017 presidential election, the Socialist party has continued to disintegrate, polling just 6.2 per cent of the vote in May’s European elections. That was marginally fewer votes than Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, which mustered a distinctly modest 6.3 per cent. The far-left leader polled well in the first round of the presidential election but as one French commentator wrote this week, his mistake was then to ‘to revert to his original culture, that of the radical left’.

As for the Socialist party, since 2007 their membership has plummeted from 260,000 to 102,000. But that is what happens when middle-class politicians alienate their traditional working-class voters.

One should feel not a jot of sympathy for the Socialist party, who have been humiliated by their hubris. In 2011, they followed the advice of a left-wing think-tank, Terra Nova, which told them that power beckoned if they appealed to a new kind of French person.