by Renie Anjeh

It’s been over a month since Labour’s devastating, but entirely avoidable, election defeat. Ed Milband’s leadership ended in abject failure. David Cameron is the first prime minister since 1900 to increase his party’s share of the vote and number of seats after a full parliamentary term. There are voices in the Labour party who understand the gravity of the situation. Jon Cruddas warned that this is the greatest crisis that the Labour party has ever faced.

Alastair Campbell reiterated Cruddas’s warnings when he told Andrew Marr that the party is in “big trouble” and “may not be at the bottom”. Unfortunately, their political sagacity is not shared by a lot of the party especially the Milibelievers. Yes, the Milibelievers are not dead. They are not even sleeping. They are alive and well and finding their voice again.

Over the last five years, the Milibelievers have given us a litany of excuses to prove that Ed Miliband was destined for Number 10. “2015 was going to be a ‘change election’”, they told us. This meant that the rules of politics no longer applied. They even said that Ed was the Left’s answer to Margaret Thatcher and he was going to reshape the political consensus.

As we learned last month, the messianic prophecies of the Milibelievers turned out to be complete and utter rubbish.

But here they come again.

Over 25 chairs of university Labour clubs wrote an open letter to Ed Miliband saying that they were “enormously proud of his principled campaign” and that we “did not lose because of what was in the manifesto”. How could anyone be “enormously proud” of a Labour leader and a campaign that cost us almost 30 seats from 2010?

Last week they were joined by Richard Biggs and Abby Tomlison – the high priests of the Church of Milifandom – when they both appeared on The Daily Politics. Tomlinson expressed her adulation of our former leader whilst Biggs told Andrew Neil on daytime television that Ed is “too fucking good for this country”.

His use of colourful language wasn’t really a problem. The problem was what he actually said. Ed Miliband is not “too fucking good for this country”, if anything he was a “fucking disaster” for all the people that needed a Labour government.

The resurgent Milibelievers are not confined to Labour’s youth wing.

Jon Trickett, a key member of Ed Miliband’s inner circle, has unsurprisingly cautioned against any move to the centre ground. He’s also the same Jon Trickett who wrote a pamphlet for Compass saying that the Tories’ were losing support and this provided space for Labour to be “braver and bolder” (i.e. more left-wing).

Recently, he argued that we need a ‘new economic story’ because there is a new centre that is opposed to the market and wants a ‘clean break from the recent past’.

This is exactly the same agenda that Ed offered the country and it is the same agenda that was roundly rejected by the British people. Labour’s revival will not come from doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. That’s what Einstein called insanity.

Trickett also advised Labour to focus on the sixteen million people who voted for parties that “wanted a break with the status quo” and the millions who did not vote. It’s an idea that is as ridiculous as going to a nunnery in search of a one night stand. More than fifty percent of the electorate voted for parties on the right and eighty percent of the voters that Labour needs to win over in 2020 voted Tory in May. We will not win safe Tory seats like Battersea or Putney (places we actually need to win to have a safe majority) by focusing on Green voters and non-voters.

The problem for the Labour party is that there is a body of opinion within the movement that agrees with the Milibelievers. Just look at this barmy post on Labour List, congratulating, yes you read right, congratulating Ed Miliband for his leadership.

They don’t accept that the party was at fault. They promote the same failed policies. They propose the same catastrophic electoral “strategies”. They lionise the same failed leaders. They are uninterested in looking for a future prime minister because they want the next leader to smother them in a comfort blanket and tell them that everything’s okay. Any attempt to move outside our comfort zone is treated with derision and contempt.

Meanwhile, David Cameron and George Osborne are intent on finishing off the Labour party for good. According to Electoral Calculus, the boundary reforms could gift the Tories with a majority of 50 and reduce Labour’s number of seats to 220.

That would be the lowest number of Labour seats since the war.

The introduction of EVEL makes Labour’s challenge even harder because it means that any future UK government will have to a majority of English MPs. There is also every possibility that Cameron’s successor (probably Osborne, Boris, May, Javid or Truss) could appeal to voters that Cameron could not reach.

Worse still, as Sam Dale pointed out, the Tories are talking about rebranding their party the ‘workers party’ and colonising Labour’s territory. The Northern Powerhouse, the appointment of Robert Halfon to the cabinet, Tim Montgomerie’s The Good Right project supported by Michael Gove and the appointment of Camilla Cavendish to the Number 10 Policy Unit (who is receptive to a lot of Steve Hilton’s ideas). The evidence is clear, the Tories are headed onto the centre ground.

When Cameron used the phrase ‘One Nation’ on the steps of Downing Street, it was not some meaningless platitude. It was a direct threat to the Labour party.

This is why it is a disaster that rather than waking up and smelling the coffee, the disciples of Miliband have doubled down on denial in their new bid to rewrite history.

If the party listens to them and continues in the same direction as the last five years, then the future is bleak. Labour will not be a party of government. It will not even be a party of protest. It will be a party of the past.

Renie Anjeh is a politics student at Leeds university

Tags: Ed Miliband, general election 2015, Jon Trickett, Labour leadership election, Labour left, Milibelievers, Renie Anjeh