The Guardian view on Labour’s defeat: an existential crisis with no easy solution

After the Labour party’s disastrous election defeat in 1983, at the hands of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, Tony Benn famously found a silver lining in the almost unbroken cloud of gloom. Writing in this newspaper, Mr Benn noted that though Labour had been routed, winning only 27.6% of the vote, millions of people had nevertheless voted for an authentically socialist manifesto. This time round, after Labour’s worst performance at a general election since 1935, there is no dodging the scale of the catastrophe. Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, rightly admitted that last Thursday’s poll was a “disaster”.

This was a defeat like no other that Labour has suffered in its 119-year history. The party haemorrhaged seats in the Midlands and north, which have been the bedrocks of its traditional support. The morning after the election, Michael Gove (inaccurately) boasted that, for the first time, the Durham Miners’ Gala and the Notting Hill carnival would both take place in constituencies held by Conservatives. That was a gleeful swipe at Labour’s very sense of itself as an institution, founded in 1900, to represent the interests of the working class in the coalfields and factory towns that drove the industrial revolution.

But Labour’s problems extend beyond places like Workington and Bishop Auckland. The party’s first leader in parliament, in 1906, was Keir Hardie, a Scottish trade unionist, reflecting its power base north of the border. But Scotland, where Labour won just 18.5% of the vote and has only one MP, is now largely hostile territory. The Scots may, during the next decade, leave the union. In England, Labour’s support seems to be reconfiguring in the same way as that of other social democratic parties in Europe, becoming confined mostly to the big cities and university towns. The coalition between middle-class professionals, often working in the public sector, and traditional working-class communities fell apart last Thursday. Without it, the party has no route to power. The challenges that face Labour are therefore existential in nature; there is no easy or obvious quick fix.

Brexit undoubtedly played a pivotal role in Labour’s humiliation. The attempt to appeal to both remain and leave voters with a convoluted and equivocal policy turned out to be doomed, though Mr McDonnell is surely right to say that the composition of its support placed it on “the horns of a dilemma” that was all but impossible to resolve. It was not all about Brexit, though. The evidence that Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity as a leader was a significant factor in last Thursday’s humiliation is incontestable. He was perceived by many to belong to a strand of the left which had little sympathy with a sense of patriotism that runs deep in leave-voting constituencies. For many Tories in remain-voting constituencies, such as Cheltenham and Guildford, fear of a Corbyn-led government appeared to trump the desire to stay in the EU.

Labour must now take the necessary time to reflect on an epochal setback. A rush to premature conclusions should be avoided at all costs. Some of the party’s policies, such as taking the railways into public ownership, were popular and should not become discredited by association with this defeat.

As a starting point, Labour clearly needs to radically reset its relationship with the towns and rural regions of England and Wales (Scotland, for the moment, seems unlikely to be the part of any solution). To do this will require, first of all, a recognition that a one-size-fits-all approach will not work. The needs, concerns and priorities of Spennymoor in County Durham are not the same as those of the university town of Canterbury. A more subtle politics of place, in which the revival and deepening of local democracy is championed, will help Labour begin to reconnect in the years to come. In a way, this is where the party came in, in the twilight years of the 19th century. It emerged then as a civilising force for community, solidarity and self-help, run by and for the industrial working classes. The same yearning for communal renewal characterises post-industrial Britain. This was once, in every sense, Labour’s natural terrain. It can be so again.