IF EVER there were a time for the Labour Party to take a reality check, it would be now. Its share of the vote in May’s general election was its third-worst since 1918. The new Conservative government will soon redraw constituency boundaries to its own advantage and is moving onto Labour’s traditional ground, increasing the minimum wage and wooing northern cities. To win the next election, in 2020, Labour must make deep inroads into Tory England, producing a swing away from the Conservatives on the scale of its landslide victory under Tony Blair in 1997.

Instead the party is hurtling into the wilderness. Of the four candidates for its leadership, vacated by Ed Miliband hours after the election defeat, three—Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and Jeremy Corbyn—have concentrated less on broadening its appeal than on telling members what they want to hear. The result has been a lacklustre, self-indulgent contest and a stark illustration of Labour’s leftward shift during Mr Miliband’s five years in charge.

The myopia is not universal. The fourth candidate, Liz Kendall, a shadow health minister, has urged her party to claw back the economic credibility that it lost before the election. She has front-bench allies, most notably Chuka Umunna and Tristram Hunt, who warned in a speech on July 15th that the party could vanish “overnight” if it did not change. On July 22nd even Mr Blair waded in, telling an audience of supporters that there need not be a conflict between “the pursuit of power and the purity of principle”.

Such admonitions are, however, confined to the contest’s margins. Ms Kendall has been branded a “Tory” by her Labour opponents and looks likely to come last when the contest culminates on September 12th. Meanwhile Mr Burnham, the leftish shadow health secretary and long-time favourite, rails against a “Westminster elite” of which he is conspicuously part and claims the manifesto on which the party stood in May was the best in its recent history. Ms Cooper, his main rival, hedges her every statement in a bid to win through sheer inoffensiveness (a nod to Labour’s electoral system, which rewards the least unpopular candidate). Neither has offered a hard-nosed account of the party’s defeat—or substantial ideas for its future.

Two recent developments have highlighted Labour’s resistance to harsh realities. First, Mr Corbyn, a hardened socialist who admires the Syriza government in Greece and advocates much higher taxes on business and the wealthy, is doing remarkably well. The MP for Islington North has more nominations from constituency branches than any other candidate. A poll of Labour and union members by YouGov for the Times on July 22nd even suggested that he would win—an eventuality that would wreck the party’s already gloomy electoral prospects.

Second, the party missed a chance to take a symbolic step forward. On July 13th Harriet Harman, its capable interim leader, decreed that Labour would not resist welfare cuts without identifying alternative savings. Mr Burnham, Ms Cooper and Mr Corbyn all condemned her order to abstain in a vote on benefit restrictions on July 20th. Forty-eight Labour MPs—nearly one in five—rebelled, an embarrassing blow to her modest bid to break with the Miliband years, when the party opposed changes (like capping welfare entitlements at average earnings) that were popular not just with the electorate at large but with most Labour supporters, too.

The house that Ed built

Rare optimists among Labour’s centrists say the party is merely stunned by its defeat in May. In truth, its funk has deeper roots. At the last leadership election, in 2010, most Labour members and MPs backed David Miliband, the most credible of the candidates. But overwhelming support from the unions pushed his more left-wing brother, Ed, across the line. The party changed under his leadership. Experienced centrists were sidelined; others, dismayed at Labour’s direction, left politics. Unions extended their influence over the party’s messages and candidate selections. The hue of the membership reddened as comrades who had quit during the Blair years returned to the fold, and beardy Liberal Democrats disappointed by their party’s coalition with the Tories defected.

That generational churn is reflected in the party’s divisions. Almost half of the welfare rebels of July 20th are in the new intake of MPs. Twelve members of the class of 2015 nominated Mr Corbyn, compared with two who backed Ms Kendall. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the influx of new members since Labour’s election defeat—about 50,000 in total—is disproportionately left-leaning. At several hustings candidates have been booed and heckled for backing things like Britain’s nuclear deterrent that were relatively uncontroversial in the party a few years ago.

Conservatives are predictably chipper about Labour’s march towards electoral oblivion, their delight amplified by the fact that the Lib Dems, too, are retreating to their comfort zone. On July 16th Tim Farron, a serial critic of the coalition, won that party’s own leadership election. He immediately moved it back towards familiar protest politics, criticising both the government’s welfare cuts and its plans to bomb Islamic State in Syria (see article).

But even Tories should worry about the direction of left and liberal politics in Britain. If Labour and the Lib Dems are consumed by irrelevance, the remaining opposition force will be the Scottish National Party, which wants to leave the country altogether. The government will go without proper scrutiny, its more illiberal and isolationist tendencies unmitigated by a credible counterweight. The next election will be uncompetitive. The sappy, introspective state of the opposition is terrible for its members. It is bad for Britain, too.