“Leave voters thought we were pro-remain; remain voters thought we were pro-leave and the membership were so fed up they refused to take part in the campaign.” That’s how a senior Labour politician in the party’s Welsh heartlands described the European parliament election drive. The results were inevitable.

Labour came third in Wales, behind Plaid Cymru. In Yorkshire and the Humber it suppressed its own vote so badly that turnout in Hull slumped to 24%. Labour won around 14% of the popular vote – down 10 points on 2014 – and is set to lose nearly half its seats in Brussels.

There are upsides to this dreadful night: Tommy Robinson was defeated in humiliating fashion. And once Scotland is counted the combined votes of the outright pro-remain parties should be higher than the outright no-deal leave total. If this was a proxy referendum, as Jeremy Corbyn now admits, nobody really won it hands down.

But Labour supporters have to look reality in the face. Since December, Corbyn and his advisers have got the Brexit strategy badly wrong. They stayed in fruitless talks for weeks, then refrained from launching the EU campaign for fear of contaminating the local election campaign, and as a result lost both. The campaign execution was dire from the top down.

A ComRes poll on 21 May showed that, with a clear position of remain and reform and the call for a second referendum on any deal, Labour could have beaten Farage’s Brexit party and cemented the electoral alliance that could put it into power. But – as at all other times – Corbyn’s advisers saw fit to ignore the evidence.

Given the scale of the reversal, it looks likely that the Labour right will launch a new leadership challenge against Corbyn. They may wait until after the Peterborough byelection and the announcement of a formal probe into alleged antisemitism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. That challenge can and must be defeated, even at the cost of yet another wasted summer.

But the leadership’s Brexit position and the woeful performance of senior officials have now become an impediment to defending the left project. I will enthusiastically circle the wagons around Corbyn. He has grown since 2015 into a politician who thrives on adversity and class struggle and will do so now. But the officials who designed this fiasco, and ignored all evidence that it would lead to disaster, must be removed from positions of influence.

They include Seumas Milne, director of strategy, and Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s chief of staff. With an electoral fiasco like this, the buck has to stop somewhere, and it must stop with them – together with Ian Lavery MP, the party chair, who twice broke the whip to oppose the second referendum.

But Labour needs more than an office reorganisation. To go forward, the leadership needs to recognise facts it has become reluctant to face. The Labour surge of 2017 was caused by a mixture of Corbyn’s honesty, and the dire campaign waged by Theresa May, but above all by large-scale tactical voting among remain voters.

Last night’s results show what can happen when these conditions don’t apply. To renew Labour’s electoral alliance with progressive young voters, the salaried working class of the big cities and progressive working-class voters in the ex-industrial towns, the party needs to unite around the strategy of remain and reform in Europe. It needs to tell voters honestly: it’s time to scrap Brexit and rebuild Britain instead.

Those of us who want that strategy must acknowledge the challenge it will pose in former industrial areas. The doorstep in places affected by hopelessness and dollar-fuelled fascist propaganda is brutal. Nobody in their right mind wants to tear their local society apart again over Brexit, if it can be avoided. But the rise of the Brexit party demands we fight now about values, not simply policies.

Corbyn’s mistake was not simply triangulation between the values of leave and remain voters. It was an attempt at triangulation between two wings of Corbynism: between the demands of an economic nationalist current from the old left, and the internationalist and progressive politics embedded in Labour’s new urban heartlands. I understand his loyalty to the former group, they stuck with him through every attack. But their politics are a throwback, and the voters rejected them last night.

Being seen to deliver Brexit loses votes from progressive voters and wins none back from more socially conservative ones. That’s exactly what a leaked internal poll by Hope Not Hate and the TSSA union told Corbyn back in February. It was ignored.

So Corbyn now needs to put political strategy into the hands of Labour’s senior politicians, not officials. He needs a collegiate inner cabinet and some advisers who are prepared to believe polling and challenge complacency. Rather than simply throw a switch bureaucratically, Corbyn should fight for the new line of remain/reform in an internal vote, either of all the members or at the national policy forum.

To win back the ex-industrial towns where people have turned out in large numbers for Farage, Labour needs to talk about more than economics. It needs to fight personal insecurity, crime, drugs, antisocial behaviour and organised crime as enthusiastically as it fights racism. It needs to sideline all voices who believe having a strong national security policy is somehow “imperialist”. It needs to forget scrapping Trident. The reluctance to speak this language this is, I believe, what left Labour over-reliant on triangulating to accommodate the pro-Brexit views of some voters in these towns.

We who have accepted the label of Corbynism also need to face facts. If the term “Corbynism” now includes a human rights lawyer such as Keir Starmer, together with a figure such as Barry Gardiner, who turns out to be a fan of the Hindu chauvinist Narendra Modi, plus the neo-Stalinists and social conservatives who supported the Full Brexit campaign, it is not really an “ism” at all.

The Labour right know this. If they were able to take out the party leader, the project would shatter. To prevent this happening, we can’t hide forever from the profound differences over totalitarianism, values, national security and geopolitics that Corbynism up to now has contained.

One day, many years in the future, there will be a Corbynism without Corbyn, and we need to spell out now the radical democratic and humanist values around which the project continues.

We have to begin from the facts: the struggle against rightwing authoritarianism and fascism is now the main priority. No amount of pledges to nationalise stuff, or appeals to class solidarity, wins that war. We are engaged in a culture war over values and narratives. Labour’s narrative has to be built around resistance to Brexit as a project of the racist and xenophobic right, and a story of communities revived by hope and solidarity.

If we do that, the voters of Mansfield, Walsall, Merthyr Tydfil and Hull will at least know where we stand. They may decide, as some on the doorstep say, that they “don’t care if the economy collapses as long as the migrants go away”. Or, if we work patiently through community organising teams and promote young working-class politicians to the front bench, we might be able to move the conversation on from Brexit.

But we don’t have much time. When May resigned a political era ended. If Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab or Penny Mordaunt win the Tory leadership they will put Britain on the path to a no-deal Brexit. That destroys the space in which the “get Brexit over with” wing of Corbynism has been operating.

The only Brexit then on offer is the chaos of no deal. We have to oppose that root and branch. As this phase develops I suspect the second referendum will become a non-issue. There will be nothing left of soft Brexit to have the referendum on.

For Labour the situation is saveable. It needs contrition from the leadership – as in “we got it wrong, we are sorry and we are making changes”. Get it right and Johnson’s premiership ends in flames and a government of radical transformation is on the cards. Get it wrong again, and the danger is that the left project could collapse under its internal tensions.

• Paul Mason is a writer and broadcaster on economics and social justice



