It has not been a great start to the term for Labour MPs. Last week, the government decided to close down the Palace of Westminster for future repairs; today it is abolishing our constituencies.

In an act of grotesque gerrymandering, some 23 Labour seats will be liquidated, hundreds of other seats affected and 2 million voters disenfranchised. On an out-of-date electoral register, hundreds of thousands of young people who registered to vote in the EU referendum are being denied a voice in the new constituencies. Wales will lose a quarter of its representatives as no account is taken of the asymmetric needs of the Union. While the Tories pack the Lords, they are thinning out the Commons beginning, with their usual gift for power, with Jeremy Corbyn’s own Islington North seat that is set to be discontinued.

Driving these changes is not a considered idea about the nature of representation and accountability in the 21st century, but David Cameron’s arbitrary desire to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600. So it was perhaps only fitting that he chose to quit on the day the Boundary Commission announced its conclusions.

In Stoke-on-Trent, my own constituency is being parcelled out between my parliamentary neighbours Ruth Smeeth and Rob Flello. We are all busily working out which new seat we might be able to contest in any future election, inevitably pitting colleague against colleague, who have worked closely together for the good of their constituents down the years. It is only right that Labour party members decide who they want as their candidate, but I fear it will take all our reservoirs of fraternity and comradeship to keep it civil. As such, we look set for a more American culture of primaries, with their relentless fundraising and electioneering – and, of course, more power to some highly motivated partisans.

The Boundary Commission has decided to indulge the growing impatience – across western Europe and America – with representative democracy. In the current climate, we in the Labour party are particularly vulnerable, with the leadership seeming to place little value in the role and function of MPs. When Corbyn came to Stoke-on-Trent recently, his travelling caravan included Socialist party activists gathering names for a “deselect the Blairites” petition.

Of course, scepticism towards MPs is right and proper: we can be a self-important, fractious and pernickety bunch. But such has been the change in Labour membership – with some 75% joining since 2010 –we are now in danger of losing our institutional memory of the party as a governing project. Increasingly, activists regard MPs as a frustrating hindrance towards radical social change, rather than the vehicle for it. And that mindset spells misery for the communities we serve.

Clause 1 of our constitution is clear: “To organise and maintain a political Labour party in parliament and the country.” It was a conviction that emerged from the particular history of the Labour party. Unlike so many continental leftwing parties, Labour from the beginning disavowed both Marxian communism and William Morris’s utopian socialism. To Marx and Engels’s deep frustration, Labour was a socially conservative, provincial party born of a gritty, practical determination to represent working people. The 1885 general election saw the return of 10 trade union MPs, before the Independent Labour party was established in 1893. It was not, to begin with, a socialist party; instead, Labour focused on securing better working conditions, trade union rights and pay.

‘Despite Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell being professional politicians all their lives they have combined the extra-parliamentary Bennite culture with a bit of Latin American populism to transform the Labour party into a street stall and barrios protest movement.’ Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA

Even Keir Hardie regarded himself as part of a broader progressive consensus. Consciously opposed to “state socialists of the German type”, he supported “radical unity” with his appeal to the Liberals for “a fusion of advanced forces”. What is more, he believed in the merits of parliament and the point of representative democracy.

The punitive Taff Vale judgment (which made the railwaymen’s union financially liable for financial damages arising from a local strike) only increased the need to have Labour MPs in parliament making laws to protect working people. And at the 1906 general election the Labour party came of age, with 29 MPs co-operating with the Liberal party to restore trade union rights and legislate for free school meals. Of course, there was always another tradition within the Labour movement. The hard-left Green Manifesto of 1910 denounced the democratic route to socialism as “one of the seven deadly sins”. Later Ralph Miliband would condemn the Labour party’s “parliamentarism” as a crippling source of compromise and class surrender. Even as Harold Wilson was keeping us out of Vietnam, taking us into Europe and putting radical social and sexual equality on the statute book, the New Left of EP Thompson and Raymond Williams was denouncing such “Labourist” treachery.

The difference now is that the disregard for parliamentary democracy is endorsed by the top of the party. Despite Corbyn and John McDonnell being professional politicians all their lives – in local government and Westminster – they have combined the extra-parliamentary Bennite culture with a bit of Latin American populism to transform the Labour party from an alternative government to a street stall and barrios protest movement. As their guru Jon Lansman, of Momentum, puts it: “Democracy gives power to people, ‘winning’ is the small bit that matters to political elites who want to keep power to themselves.” It is fair to say that Hardie and Richard Bell probably took a different view.

Even fellow travellers of the new populist left reject such a disdain towards power. With its revolutionary policy “circles”, Podemos of Spain is at the vanguard of participatory democracy. Yet its leader, Pablo Iglesias, has always stated that winning power is the ultimate goal – even if that means rejecting the circle members’ policy recommendations, as happened with its 2015 manifesto. Certainly, it is hard to square Iglesias’s appeal to the “decent people” who sometimes vote conservative or his party’s openness to regional coalitions, with the ideological purity demanded by Corbynistas.

So while the British people are in a fractious, anti-political mood, Labour must continue to make the case to activists and boundary commissioners of the need for a parliamentary road to socialism. Failing to do so means we are turning our back upon something as ingrained in Labour’s soul as democratic socialism itself. Frankly, if we don’t value having MPs, what is to stop the Tories from abolishing our seats altogether?