Alert readers will have noticed that for the last week or so we’ve been challenging some of the conventional wisdom about Labour’s election victories from 1997-2005. While the right wing of the party and commentariat regularly insists that Tony Blair was its most successful leader ever, we demonstrated that over the course of his leadership he lost Labour over two million votes, whereas Neil Kinnock’s reign had resulted in a GAIN of three million.

In short, New Labour’s victories were primarily the result of the Conservatives being in a catastrophic state during Blair’s rule, exhausted by almost 20 years of power and scandal and infighting about Europe. With William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard at the head of a shattered opposition, Labour could have won those elections with Piers Morgan or a Teletubby in charge.

What our research also found was that the most striking thing about the period since Blair became Labour leader in 1994 was a staggering and almost overnight increase in the number of British voters turned off politics altogether.

In 1992 just eight million people entitled to vote stayed at home. By 2001 that number had rocketed to EIGHTEEN million, a 125% increase in nine years, and in May it was still at almost 16 million.

Since Blair, eight million UK citizens who used to vote have simply walked away and washed their hands of the entire political process. That’s quite a legacy, but it’s also an opportunity, because it’s a lot of people waiting for a reason to vote for someone. (Most of them young and/or poor, two traditionally Labour-friendly demographics.)

Bizarrely, it’s an opportunity Labour and its allies seem utterly determined to shun.

This weekend the Observer published the results of a survey it had commissioned among voters who’d backed Labour in 2010 but who defected to the Tories this year. Funnily enough, despite the claims made about a similar recent Survation poll, there isn’t a single mention of the SNP in the article as the reason for their switching.

The piece notes some of the reasons they did give:

“[they] believed that Labour had left the economy in a mess and that the Tories had gone some way towards putting it right” “[Labour] was also seen as anti-business, in the pocket of the unions and not tough enough on immigration” “They seemed to be on the side of people on the social not people in the middle like us.” “Immigration is the topic that, left to their own devices, the respondents would have talked about all night.” “It’s not up to the government to provide good jobs; that sounds like the nanny state.” “It might be the moral thing to look after those refugees, but we can’t let them in while we’ve got two million unemployed.”

We can sum those reasons up in four words: these people are Tories.

Anti-immigration, anti-welfare, anti-public sector, anti-unions. You’d be hard pushed to better describe a natural Conservative (or UKIP) voter. Goodness knows how these people ever came to be voting Labour in the first place. But there’s another, far more important finding about them in the survey:

That’s pretty unequivocal, right? That’s a direct, open statement that Labour is wasting its time even TRYING to attract these people back for the next election. Or in other words, pursuing them will mean absolutely certain defeat and a minimum of 15 years of Tory government.

So who IS going to elect Labour, if not these Tories? It’s a Catch 22 – the deserters will never vote Labour again until Labour get in, but in pursuing them Labour can only alienate its core vote, making sure it never does.

So regardless of whatever your personal beliefs might be, the ONLY sane conclusion supported by the empirical evidence is that Labour MUST find the millions of voters it needs from somewhere other than the Conservatives.

There are almost no Lib Dem voters left to capture. It’s not getting them from the SNP any time soon and winning over any of the four million who voted UKIP seems like a very long shot. The ONLY resource available for Labour to tap is the disillusioned, disenchanted, millions-strong left that New Labour drove into apathy.

Obvious, right? The inescapable product of any process of basic logical thought. Yet astonishingly, in an editorial on the poll the Observer leaps exactly the other way:

What? Weren’t you listening?

What the paper’s own survey found was that chasing after Tory voters was a futile approach doomed to certain failure, yet it’s exactly what it recommends Labour does. It demands that Labour bins its ideology and principles – that is, its entire reason for existing – in the vain hope of power that would be meaningless anyway:

Harold Wilson – who won four elections as Labour leader, one more than Tony Blair, in far more difficult conditions – famously said that “the Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing”. The current incarnation of the party has descended so far into barking lunacy that not only is it choosing the latter option, it’s plotting to immediately overthrow its own democratically-elected leader if the only candidate who stands for those moral values wins the contest.