Theresa May has spent her weekend sacking her closest advisers and carrying out an emergency cabinet reshuffle in a desperate attempt to avoid taking responsibility for a disastrous election campaign and save her premiership. According to one of her former advisers, she is “friendless and alone”. She deserves to be.

Labour’s politics of hope have overcome the politics of fear | John McDonnell Read more

If she insists on driving through a deal with the Democratic Unionist party in order to prop up her government then Labour party members should prepare for an autumn general election that we can and will win.

A Tory-DUP alliance will be so fragile that it may even have collapsed under the weight of disapproval from the prime minister’s own MPs by the time this article is published. The DUP holds positions that are simply not compatible with the views of many Tory MPs. It is a coalition that cannot last.

Labour MPs will return to parliament tomorrow rejuvenated, re-energised and united behind Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, our numbers swelled by 47 newly elected colleagues who reflect the diversity of our country. They include 22 new female Labour MPs – taking the total on the opposition benches to 119 – two new disabled MPs and two new Sikh MPs, including the first turbaned Sikh and the first woman to be elected from the UK’s over 400,000-strong Sikh community.

Like John Major’s administration in the mid-1990s, the Tories are in office but not in power. And just as Labour MPs did in parliament in the mid-1990s, it is our job now to make the government’s job a living nightmare. We will throw ourselves into the task of parliamentary scrutiny, with every vote on a knife-edge, every line of legislation scrutinised, every minister held to account. We will expose the ideological paucity behind the prime minister’s vacuous political slogans, which failed to convince the electorate that she could be trusted to run the country.

Most important of all, we will identify the handful of seats we need to gain or reclaim in order to win the next election, which is highly likely to take place this year as May’s political authority is further eroded. There are 70 SNP, Lib Dem or Tory seats with majorities of less than 4,000. We need to win 64 of them to form a government.

If we can win back those who voted for us in 2015 but not in 2017 and gain some of those who backed Theresa May but are horrified by her new coalition of chaos, while holding on to those motivated to support us for the first time by Jeremy Corbyn and his message of hope, we can gain the majority that has eluded us for the last three elections. In order to do so, we also need to reassure working-class communities who traditionally voted Labour that we are serious about security and the defence of the realm. In simple terms: we need to do a little better than we did this time, and we need to make sure the Tories do a little worse.

We will throw ourselves into the task of parliamentary scrutiny, with every vote on a knife-edge

It was the prime minister who called this election, but it is the Labour party that used it to build a coalition of 12.8 million voters who rejected May’s vision of an inward-looking, intolerant and unequal Britain. Places such as Canterbury, Peterborough and Kensington, which Labour has never won before or not held for many years, responded positively to Labour’s message of hope and rejected May’s relentlessly negative campaign.

By voting Labour they told her their idea of “strength and stability” is being members of a society that looks out for the old and the dispossessed and offers young people a debt-free future they can believe in. They rejected the notion that narrow self-interest is the only thing that motivates us. They endorsed Labour values of community and fairness.

If we can convince a greater number of people in places such as Mansfield, Walsall and Middlesbrough – places with a history of electing Labour MPs but which rejected us this time – Jeremy Corbyn could be in No 10 by the end of the year. That is the election-winning coalition we must build over the coming weeks and months.

If the whole Labour party comes together, using our bigger presence in parliament to harry, harass and harangue the Tories with fresh intensity and a singularity of purpose, we can take them apart. That’s our job. We’re all going to get on with it.