Smiley optimism was once their calling card, but the one-time disciples of New Labour must be looking into the new year with deep dread: 2015 was bad; 2016 could be worse. But what to do, beyond moaning?

Tony Blair recently pronounced his party’s current position a “tragedy”. Now Peter Mandelson has advised that the time for hand-wringing is over, and his former Labour colleagues ought to “fight for the party’s future” against a leader who is apparently an “intentionally divisive figure”, using “very unconventional means” to strengthen his grip (some of this may sound familiar).

Meanwhile, as evidenced by all that speculation about a looming shadow cabinet reshuffle, Jeremy Corbyn is clearly digging in.

The makeup of what might be called the coalition of the unwilling is pretty clear: a mixture of Blairites, Brownites, the inheritors of the part of the old Labour right once rooted in some of the unions, and that great swath of Labour MPs who have no great factional loyalties but are deeply unsettled by their party’s sudden left turn. Their pain, it seems, is shared by a reasonable number of activists, some of whom have decided to quit the party altogether. But so far, most of these people have displayed a remarkable lack of willingness to even understand their own predicament, let alone do anything meaningful about it.

Peter Mandelson: Labour is a broad church – Jeremy Corbyn is turning it into a narrow sect bound for the abyss Read more

Their script goes something like this. Never mind 50 years of deindustrialisation, a deepening Europe-wide crisis of social democracy, or the downsides of the Blair and Brown years, to quote the Labour-aligned thinktank Policy Network: last year’s election defeat could be reduced to two key factors – Labour’s failure to pay enough attention to “economic competence”, and the fact that “the public did not perceive Ed Miliband as a credible prime minister”.

As and when the Corbyn project implodes, goes the apparent argument, a new leader with the right plan will finally be summoned, and Labour will be back in the game. Despite his protestations, the prince across the water used to be Alan Johnson. Now that dubious honour seems to have fallen to the soldier-turned-politician Dan Jarvis. If he isn’t up for it, there’s always that unlikely recent success story, Hilary Benn. Or maybe the Birmingham MP Jess Phillips: a good egg, it seems, but so far lionised chiefly because she has the fairly ordinary talent of speaking her mind, and has an obvious sense of humour.

While the self-styled moderates – many of whom, it has to be said, are not moderate at all – pick their latest favourite, those who once gave them their lead occasionally pipe up. Blair’s latest contribution to the Labour debate was a flatly strange article in the Spectator, sprinkled with the usual gnomic formulations (eg “true progressives are always the modernisers”). That piece was followed by a slightly better one by his former speechwriter and strategist Peter Hyman, now the headteacher of a free school. He proposed a left-right split, and offered a watery vision of what latter-day “modernisers” should be all about: a “renewed sense of moral purpose”, reducible to the hoary New Labour emphasis on social mobility, and a politics that would “be seen to be grappling seriously with the big questions of the day: migration, globalisation, terrorism, the environment, welfare, housing, our place in the world”.

If that sounded rather vapid, it was as nothing compared with Mandelson’s intervention on these pages: an extended hyperventilation about Corbyn and his allies using comparable methods to the ones that clinched Blair and co’s grip on the party all those years ago. (It is for, example, no use getting in a lather about activists demanding deselections when you have been an integral part of a machine that specialised in the parachuting-in of chosen insiders to safe Labour seats.) Worse still, beyond vague allusions to Labour’s supposed “centre ground”, it offered no hint of what a substantive alternative to the current leadership might actually entail.

I am not exactly what some people call a Corbynista, but the realities such analyses evade seem simple enough. Whatever his suitability for the job, Corbyn is where he is for one reason above all others: the fact that Britain’s post-1979 journey into a new reality of a shrunken welfare state, marketised public services, rising inequality and an impossible job market had reached a watershed with the deepening of austerity, and there was a need for a clear moral response, without which Labour was in danger of shrinking into meaninglessness. On that score, over the summer of 2015, the heirs to the New Labour project were deservedly found wanting; indeed, their very philosophy was fatally exposed.

A few non-Corbynites are beginning to understand what the moment might require of those who want to revive the parts of Labour beyond the radical left. The former shadow education minister Tristram Hunt had a decidedly mixed 2015, but he recently talked pretty powerfully at the Fabian Society about the politics of inequality, Labour’s frayed bond with working-class voters and the necessity of reinventing the party’s belief in redistribution. Chuka Umunna has recently made welcome noises about changing the voting system; some voices one would once have associated with 1997-era orthodoxy have lately been making the case for a citizen’s income; the idea of an unconditional payment granted to every individual as a right of citizenship..

Out in the real world, meanwhile, The Labour leaders of British cities are exploring the theory and practice of centre-left politics in unspeakably difficult times. What they do every working day contains profound lessons for their party, particularly for those who yearn for a revival of its old political centre. But as the supposed moderates protest, they barely seem to have a place in the conversation. Why not?

When exactly the party will even start to resolve the tensions that are going to swirl around it for the next four years – at least – is still a mystery. Whether it is still possible to meaningfully talk about a Labour mainstream connected to the bulk of its MPs is even more uncertain. But still, how depressing to find far too many Labour people who see themselves as the party’s custodians failing to do anything new, moping their way into the new year – and blaming anyone but themselves.