This is not a presidential system, we don’t elect individuals with visions and wills to sea-change societies, we do not require transition periods of months so they can form teams to do it. When Labour have mistaken the British like for strong leaders like Thatcher, deemed ‘presidential’ in their powers by some, for a like of a presidential-style sweeping campaigns of change, it crashes — just ask Kinnock.

As much as any Briton may want change, they vote to change governments. They vote on whether a PM or their shadow wins the argument in that moment. Thatcher didn’t usher in 17 years of Tory rule with a manifesto of two decade’s worth of policy, she won one argument, got into government, and then won successive arguments to enact successive policy.

Many in the country may have hated it, but with piecemeal delivery nobody could argue they lacked the liberty of voting it out.

Moreover, regardless of Labour’s fixation on media bias, one has to ask whether the issue is not in part that one party offers a simple platform at elections, and the other offers a new society. When Theresa May in 2017 pushed the envelope with sweeping changes to how care is paid for, policy that would effectively liquidate the middle-class as a class of generational wealth, the media revolted and May never recovered.

Perhaps it’s a class issue and perhaps it’s psychological. The traditional Tory classes are materially comfortable and able to wait things out — patience being perhaps their sole virtue. The traditional Labour classes are tired; tired of waiting for what their parents and grandparents should have had. Their impatience is a virtue too, it’s righteous impatience, but it is a martyr’s virtue, and time and time again they are put to the sword at the ballot box (secular martyrdom is still brutal — but like everything else visceral these days, abstracted behind paperwork).

Look at a graph of governments of the 20th and 21st centuries — Labour have lakes of power, Tories have seas, because they understand the process is enter power and build successive policy arguments from the authoritative position of the corridors of power.

Labour in theory should be a piecemeal party too — it does after all say ‘Democratic Socialist’ on the back of membership cards, not ‘Socialist’. The core of the Democratic Socialist argument is, or should be, going to the ballot box and introducing the country to socialism in stages, not a single election. As said, even the Soviets didn’t throw it all in one Five Year Plan. There comes a point where for voters, it simply looks like Labour themselves don’t believe it.

To go back to Attlee, as much as he got done, he himself made this mistake, pushing for nationalisation that no longer was in tune with his mandate: to nationalise to better the lives of post-war Britons. Perhaps if he’d held off and run in 1950 on the argument of what had been done and the sky didn’t fall down, why not nationalise further, he’d have won power and not just the popular vote.

Cummings, Sunday Express, 15 March 1992

People do not trust Labour on these issues not because they don’t want nationalisation, but because they don’t trust there to not be a ‘mission creep’ from an over-urgent Labour Party that leads to a decrease in liberty. Liberty: that abstract that people may scoff at, yet it was an abstract that was the spearhead of the Brexit campaign, the abstract that has always been the primary path for the working-classes to vote for the Tories.

Working-class people have every right and reason not to trust the state; whether under red, yellow, or blue, the poor have ended up shafted by state power. The consensus may be that that working-class ‘traitor’ Essex Man was bought for 30 silver coins by Thatcher — the ‘loadsamoney’ trope — but people voted just as often to be left alone, which is all the Tories ever offer the poor, for good or ill.

‘Blue Labour’ pick up on this, but make the classic Labour mistake of not understanding it’s about liberty rather than specific issues, which they frame around LGBTQ or ‘freedom of speech’. The only real ‘socially conservative’ characteristic the working-class uniformly have is the desire to be left free and alone, and that goes for every community within the class; Black, White, Christian, Muslim, and so on. The Tories have made voters out of traditional Labour vote pools — southern white tradesman, Jewish and Indian communities — specifically by promising not much more than to leave them alone where they felt Labour have poked too much.

It’s being left alone that is the only real answer to the question why working-class people vote for a party that offers them less over a party that offers them more. They don’t trust the party offering them more to really rob Peter to pay Paul, rather, they trust them to vote to rob Peter, but worry they may find they themselves are Peter down the line. Tate & Lyle with Mr Cube were able to argue it was a nationalisation that would cost impoverished, ration-book using Britons, not aid them, and with that simple argument put the seed in the head of the British public that has never shifted.

A lot of this is about delivery. Labour may have presented itself as radically socialist in 2017 & 2019, but it was a radical socialism that mostly maintained austerity spending and promised a ‘radical’ socialist work-week that would have been roughly in line with France’s (its socialist utopia status unverified).

It was a backwards delivery from a party stuck between a rock and a hard place, a party that had to satisfy the demand from members for a socialist platform in every sector regardless of public desire (‘Abolish Eton!!’ said by very few in those ‘Red Wall’ seats), with the reality it could only deliver so much. In that sense, much of this vast socialist revolution was ‘redwashed’ post-crash consensus economics. Labour couldn’t definitively argue against the ‘magic money tree’ narrative, because to show how feasible it all was would be to show how pedestrian it all was.

Tories, with the modern cartoon mascot to replace Mr Cube — Boris Johnson — were able to argue these policies would cost voters rather than aid them, and were, like ‘Abolish Eton’, red flags for further curtailed liberties; to give a party such a mandate, where would it end? People don’t tend to vote to set those sorts of precedents.

It’s not one-sided, it’s also about delivery with the Tories too, who know from experience they can quite literally take liberties in power as long as they get in power in the first place, best done with a simple message during the election. Contrasted against a Labour Party promising to take liberties as election pledges, Tories win.

People want nationalisation, but they also want liberty. If they feel that nationalisation will decrease their liberty, they will not vote for it. You can take every individual policy to the public and find it popular, yet as a stack of 100+ policies delivered in a five-year period, people see only an erosion of liberty and an upturned life to deliver it. Moreover, they ask the question, if they want to do all of that in this term, where will they be next term?

The same gut instinct to promise one last push to a tired base with all the rewards laid out the moment we get there, the same doomed instinct of ‘socialism as salvation’.

Whatever direction Labour travels in from 2020 onwards, it must learn patience is the virtue of government — that one walks the corridors of power step-by-step — and that simple, direct promises are what those wary of the state want from prospective governments. Sadly for Labour voters, they find themselves in a leadership election dominated by candidates making pledges and announcing policies that will likely be made redundant by the next five years of Tory rule — which could easily be ten years of Tory rule.

Labour, ten years out of power, need to learn more than anything else the power liberty as a concept holds for those with the most to fear from state power.