There is no pussyfooting around Labour’s Copeland rout. Opposition parties simply do not lose byelections to governing parties. Yes, Labour’s support has been in decline in the constituency since 1997; and we know that working-class disillusionment kicked in under New Labour. But wasn’t the whole point of the Jeremy Corbyn project to reverse that trend, not have a further dramatic drop of support just two years after the last general election? And while Labour activists in Stoke should beam with pride for routing Ukip, there, too, there was a swing to the Tories.

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The polling for Labour is catastrophic. Veteran pollster John Curtice says the swing to the Tories in Copeland is even more dramatic than national opinion surveys suggest. Yes, polls can be wrong: 2015 and 1992 represent the two big polling disasters of our time. Yet in both cases, the disaster was overestimating Labour’s lead. If the current polling is wrong in any meaningful way, precedent suggests the real picture is even worse for Labour.

And if Labour loses the next election a rightwing Tory government, infused with an increasingly xenophobic and authoritarian brand of populism, will have a whopping, unassailable majority. Corbyn will certainly resign. The left will be blamed for breaking the Labour party. Several leftwing MPs will lose their seats. The remaining MPs will certainly not nominate any candidate on the left. The party will hurtle off to the right.

Those who fear the fall of Corbyn will open the door to New Labour-style politics should realise that a calamitous election defeat is the way to guarantee it.

Those currently turning away from Labour are not doing so because the party wants to invest in the economy rather than cut, or introduce a genuine living wage, or return public services and utilities into the hands of the British people, or increase workers’ rights. All of these policies are supported by millions.

But a terrible defeat for Labour will be spun as a rejection of the policies Corbyn supporters rightly champion. They will be buried in the rubble. Every time anyone proposes these ideas, the response will be: “But Labour supported those under Corbyn, didn’t it, and it ended in disaster.” Britain in the aftermath of a calamitous Labour defeat will be intoxicated with Tory triumphalism, and will be an oppressive place for any vaguely progressive views.

Political debate in Britain – and much of the wider western world – is toxic and angry. That includes within Labour and the wider left. The party’s warring factions now refuse to accept that differing opinions are expressed in good faith – there have to be ulterior motives, ranging from careerism to self-aggrandisement to “virtue signalling”. When, during the last Labour leadership election, I posed critical questions for Corbyn supporters, one senior leftwing figure told me I had resigned from the left. Others on the left claim media brainwashing is chiefly responsible for Tory victories.

On the other hand, the militant anti-Corbynistas show little understanding as to why they lost in the first place. They also believe media brainwashing gifted Corbyn the leadership, albeit from leftwing newspaper columnists. Labour’s electoral system, which helped grant Corbyn victory, was designed under pressure from the party’s right. They believed it would dilute the influence of the unions, encouraging more representative members of the electorate to join and support candidates closer to the “centre ground”. Corbyn didn’t win in 2015; his opponents lost. They had no compelling or coherent alternative, and couldn’t inspire members of their own party – let alone the wider public – to vote for them. They left a vacuum, and it was filled.

That remains the case, as the more perceptive among their ranks recognise. The less perceptive have become embittered nihilists, defined almost exclusively by hostility to the left. In fact, Corbyn’s victory was just another example of the wildly differing manifestations of the discontent sweeping the western world – from Trump to Sanders, from the Scottish independence movement to the French Front National, from Spain’s Podemos to Austria’s far-right.

Corbyn is a man of principle who has repeatedly been on the right side of history. He was arrested for campaigning against apartheid when Margaret Thatcher was denouncing the ANC as terrorists; he supported LGBT rights when it was “loony left” to do so; he campaigned against Saddam Hussein when our government armed the murderous despot; he later opposed the Iraq war. On the big issues of the day – such as public investment in our economy, tax justice, workers’ rights, the housing crisis, the NHS – he is absolutely right.

Corbyn is not responsible for all of Labour’s ills – far from it. The party is beset by a multitude of structural problems: the crisis of social democratic and centre-left parties across the western world; the post-Brexit division in its electoral coalition between working-class voters in small towns and university-educated voters in big cities; a widening generational divide in voting; and the failure of his predecessors to defend Labour’s record on spending, which continues to undermine the case for investment. These are underlying problems predating Corbyn.

Yet the leadership has not only failed to address them, but actually made many of them worse. Of course it’s correct, as Corbyn’s supporters often point out, that Britain’s press is owned by an aggressively rightwing cabal who demonise anyone who even vaguely challenges the status quo. But there needs to be a sophisticated strategy to deal with such entrenched opposition; it has been sorely lacking.

And his supporters are right to say that last year’s shambolic coup attempt damaged the party: it was both outrageous and the mark of a farcical absence of political strategy to cripple the opposition at a time of national crisis immediately after the Brexit vote. It undoubtedly has impacted on Labour’s polling. It was delusional to imagine Owen Smith would prove more electable, given his gaffe-ridden commitment to overturning the EU referendum and even refusing to rule out membership of the euro and Schengen. Elements of the parliamentary Labour party undermined Corbyn from the very beginning. But Labour has not once been ahead in the average of polls (which is what counts) since the last general election. Under Miliband, Labour was significantly ahead for long periods through the last parliament, but that was not enough to secure victory. For Labour to have a polling deficit between elections is a huge pointer to defeat. Since the coup failure, Corbyn’s internal critics have remained largely silent, yet Labour’s polling has continued to slide.

Corbyn did not stand in the first leadership election to win. He stood to put the left’s policies on the agenda, serve as a brake on the other candidates marching off to the right and to build up a grassroots movement. Momentum was not intended to be the praetorian guard of the leader, but rather the re-emergence of an organised left. On the day of the first televised hustings, Corbyn told me he thought getting 25% of the vote would be a success.

When it was clear he was going to win, many felt anxious. Winning the leadership, after all, had not been the point of the exercise. There were, to say the least, question marks over Corbyn’s ability to take on such a demanding position, partly because of the lack of preparation for a leftwing leadership, and the firestorm that would come. It was, though, critical to do everything possible to try to make a deeply unexpected victory work and to advance the cause of the left.

I believed Corbyn could defy the odds against him by reaching out to those who were neither in poverty or well-off; having a sophisticated media strategy; focusing on issues that mattered to average voters, including older Britons and the self-employed; having a narrative on immigration that didn’t mean indulging xenophobia; redefining patriotism in a way that celebrated great achievements such as the NHS and our ancestors winning rights and freedoms. Above all else, making sure that the leadership had a good first impression – because a bad first impression is extremely hard to shift.

Many others who wanted to make this unexpected victory work offered helpful advice. Yet it just wasn’t listened to, it certainly wasn’t implemented, and Corbyn’s first impression was disastrous. A coherent strategy, a coherent vision and a clear message never emerged. Various terrible missteps played directly into the Tory narrative. If you don’t define yourself, you will be defined by your opponents, and my goodness this applies to Corbyn’s leadership. Astonishingly, the polling suggests Corbyn even trails Theresa May when it comes to the public knowing what they stand for. It is soul-destroying to watch great ideals and policies being dragged down, not by their own merits, but through a lack of strategy and basic competence.

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So what now? Corbyn is a decent, honourable and principled man. He has to make a decision, and so do his parliamentary opponents. Whatever happens with the leadership, he needs to set out a clear and coherent strategy about how exactly Labour can overcome its existential crisis. Since the byelection rout, he has made it clear he isn’t going anywhere without even offering the vaguest outlines about how to turn it around. That isn’t good enough: again, consider the stakes. Both he and his team have to think hard. If Corbyn decides he is unable to confront the multiple existential crises enveloping Labour, then an agreement should be struck where he can stand down in exchange for the guarantee of an MP from the new generation on the ballot paper who is committed to the policies that inspired Corbyn’s supporters in the first place. It is up to both Corbyn and the parliamentary Labour party. They should both be aware that history is a savage judge.

I understand the dilemma torturing so many who supported Corbyn. Lifelong commitment to a good and noble cause; fear that if Corbyn falls the cause will fall with him; yet fear that his project is failing badly and risks destroying the cause in any case. Not only the future of Labour but the future of this country depends on what the party decides. Either we become a country riddled with hatred and fear, a playground for billionaires, that slashes support for the working poor and disabled people, that runs down and flogs off the services we depend on; or a country run in the interests of the real wealth creators, working people.