The first constituency to fall was Blyth Valley. Previously considered a Labour stronghold, Blyth Valley had been held by the party with a comfortable margin since its creation in 1950. It had been the seat of former coalminer, avowed socialist and Eurosceptic Ronnie Campbell since 1987. Campbell didn’t stand this time and was lucky enough to avoid the wave that knocked Labour from this seat for the first time in history. Labour’s total dropped 15%, with most of that going to the Brexit Party and enough flowing to the Conservatives for them to nudge in front. Blyth Valley would be the first of a landslide, as one by one seats across the old heartland fell. Wrexham in Wales (held since 1935) fell with an almost 10% swing. Leigh in Manchester had been held since 1922, Labour suffered a 15% swing there. West Browmich West and West Bromwich East, Bishop Auckland, Bridgend, Don Valley, Bassetlaw and Sedgefield, seats with long and often unbroken Labour legacies, fell to huge swings that favoured the Tories and the Brexit Party.

Workington was probably the party’s most symbolic loss. Throughout the campaign, pundits had spoken of “Workington Man” an archetype of the white working-class northern Leaver. Economically pessimistic and somewhat socially conservative, Workington Man drank lager and watched rugby league. He was supposed to be key to a Conservative majority in the Commons and unfortunately for Labour, this trite stereotype of a voter seemed to have gone the way that polling had indicated. Workington, just like so many other Northern English and Welsh post-industrial seats, went Blue for the first time in generations. Workington had been Labour since the Khaki Election of 1918, when suffrage was expanded to include poorer men and most adult women. Until Thursday, no one alive had seen a Tory MP represent the constituency.

The saddest loss of the night was that of Bolsover and MP Dennis Skinner. A socialist of the Old School, much like Ronnie Campbell, Skinner had started in the mines and come into parliament via his union. Once there he established himself as the fiercest socialist voice in the House of Commons, known for his routine heckling of the Queen’s Speech. Serving his class in parliament for almost fifty years, Skinner will be sorely missed by Labour’s Left. Another casualty for the Corbynite wing was the up and coming Laura Pidcock. Appearing on television throughout the election campaign, Pidcock became known for her strong defence of the Labour Party and its anti-austerity program. But her seat, North West Durham, could not survive the wave. Pidcock suffered a swing of 13%, allowing the local Tory candidate to edge in front and take North West Durham for the first time since its recreation in 1950. All told Labour lost 61 seats and gained just one: the leafy and affluent constituency of Putney.

Lessons Not To Learn

Before the counting had even stopped, Corbyn’s enemies had begun to blame the defeat on the man, and by extension his radical policies. Yes, according to all polling, Corbyn was an incredibly unpopular politician. But there is no evidence to suggest that Corbyn was particularly unpopular in Wales and the North and particularly more popular elsewhere. If this election was based around Corbyn’s likeability, then we’d expect to see Labour losses across the board, but we didn’t. Instead almost all of Labour’s losses were in post-industrial Leave-voting parts of Wales and Northern England. Looking closer, detailed polling suggests that many of the public’s complaints about Corbyn as a leader come from his handling of Brexit. Yes, we might be able to blame Corbyn for the failure to win seats, we might well call his unpopularity a contributing factor, but to blame him above all else for the massacre in the North is stupid. When extended to “Corbynism” this argument holds even less water as most of Labour’s radical economic policies polled very well across Britain. A YouGov poll in November indicated that over 60% of those polled supported Labour’s tax increases on the wealthy, with slightly smaller numbers supporting worker participation on corporate boards and the nationalisation of the railways and utilities. If Corbynism means these policies, then Corbynism is not the reason Labour lost. After all, as many have noted, Corbyn’s Labour ran on an economically radical platform in 2017 and recorded a massive jump in the party vote. If these criticisms seem weak and incoherent it is because they are essentially deflections, designed to distract from the fact that many of the people calling for Corbyn’s head advocated the backflip on Brexit which actually cost the election.

Another more subtle deflection comes from Remainers on the Left. Many of these belong to the Soft Left while many others count themselves as Corbynites. The latter are, for want of a better term, New Socialists, often affiliated with Momentum (whose decisive intervention we’ll talk about a little later). They point out that in terms of total votes, the Remain parties increased their votes farm more than the Leave parties. But there’s a few problems here. Yes, a strong Liberal Democrat vote prevented Labour from retaining Kensington (one of just two Remain seats Labour lost in England), and it probably hindered their chances elsewhere. But much of this total number comes from big swings away from Labour and to the Lib Dems in Tory seats, from voters aiming to push out their incumbent above all else. In fact at least 25% of voters admitted that they were voting “tactically” and not for the party that they wished to win government. But even this quibbling about tactical voting misses the point. In and of itself, a party’s share of the total vote is meaningless. Boris Johnson has an unassailable majority on 43.6% of the vote. The Liberal Democrats’ big swing saw it lose one seat compared to its 2017 result or nine factoring in its pro-Remain defectors, none of whom retained their constituencies. Winning power is about winning seats. At least 60% of Labour’s seats voted Leave, an enormous vulnerability, and one that Johnson and Farage exploited with ease. And so no, Labour’s Brexit policy was not the best possible compromise. It was the reason why they lost this election.

Brexit Is More Than Brexit

So what lessons should we learn? What should we as socialists advocate? A simple start would be carrying out Brexit. Because for the umpteenth time, that is what all this is about. But to avoid being accused of some kind of Brexit reductionism, let me expand Brexit itself and explain why Labour chose to oppose it. Brexit is far more than just leaving the European Union. It represents a protectionist feeling whose core constituency is a large section of the British working class. It is a reaction to an accelerating neoliberalism that has brought this section of the working class nothing but misery. It has destroyed their communities and destroyed their political power. It has left a marketised and atomised world in its wake, one that is cold, hostile and empty. These people, traditional Labour voters, have been trickling away from the party for decades, but you’d think these people might have found a political home in Labour’s Old Socialist tradition, one so spectacularly revived by Jeremy Corbyn. But the fact is that Labour’s Old Socialist tradition is all but dead. Only remnants remain and they, like Dennis Skinner, are being torn from their old ground and pushed into the footnotes of history.

The New Socialists who are taking their place are very different, and they looked at Leave voters with suspicion and hostility. With a few notable exceptions, these New Socialists adopted a kind of identitarian opposition to Brexit. In the eyes of the New Socialists, Brexit was white, male, straight, old, stupid and violent. As a political position it was, by association, inextricably bound up with bigotry and by extension fascism. It was therefore cast as essentially opposed to the existence of marginalised groups that made up what New Socialists dubbed a more authentic working class. But while the party leadership had withstood the Blairites and the Soft Left on the issue of Brexit, once the New Socialists weighed in it could only fold. At its last party conference, Labour reiterated many of the popular and necessary policies of 2017, but along with these came additions from a new political tendency beginning to find its feet. Chief among these additions was the endorsement of a “People’s Vote”, with an option to Remain, an option which Labour would back. But what these New Socialists refused to understand was that the Leave Vote had become an act of both national and popular sovereignty. And when Labour chose to ignore that vote, what they told working class Leavers was that they respected neither the nation, nor the people nor democracy. The Tories on the other hand offered to respect that crucial democratic decision. And for all the deep distrust and animosity working class Leave voters felt towards them, a significant number switched their vote. And so the Labour Party lost the election.

A Pessimistic Conclusion

In the Twitter thread that was the basis for this thread I wrote:

“Now Labour has to decide whether it wants to Lean In or Step Back. Does it want to Lean In to its status as a university student and professional middle class party? Or does it want to Step Back and regain a large swathe of its working-class constituency? Does it want to manage liberalism better or break with liberalism utterly? This loss was totally about Brexit, but Brexit is totally about class (though in an annoyingly un-straightforward way). And so in the next leadership election Labour must choose its class definitively and finally.”

But I write this article over a week later and after much more thought. Now I doubt whether Labour has a real choice at all. The field is already set, the die is already cast and trends set in place long ago show no sign of shifting. A return to Blairism is not going to happen. Even a Soft Left victory by someone like Keir Starmer is unlikely unless there’s a huge change in the nature of the party membership. It’s very likely the Corbynites will win again, but this doesn’t fill me with hope. Because the fact is that, with again some notable exceptions, these activists are the new problem. Corbynism as a project was always an alliance between the remnants of the Old Socialists and the growing ranks of the New. And these New Socialists are not the vanguard of a revitalised working-class politics but of a realignment towards radical liberalism. For the most part they are of and for the professional class, a class with an entirely un-socialist political project, a radically liberal one, that masquerades as a New kind of Socialism, that uses our rhetoric but eschews our aims.

We must realise that a political alliance between the professional class and the working class is unworkable so long as the professional class holds political control, and with that in mind we should expect further realignment. Labour will lose its loyal bastion of Liverpool, as it will lose all the other post-industrial holdouts. Labour will even lose the marginalised groups that the New Socialists aimed to protect from Brexit and the gammon working class that supported it. Some of this tendency insist, perversely, that these people “have nowhere else to go”, but New Labour once said the same about voters in Sedgefield and Workington. Before long they too will declare their independence from a professional class party whose interests are divergent to their own. And that I suppose is our only hope: that as this agonising process of liquidation destroys the Left, it allows room for class politics to re-emerge. Until it does, we should expect things to worsen.