As this weekend's post-mortems of the Gorton & Denton by-election get under way its worth making the key point that I'm sure will be made anyway:
Its not so much that Labour voters have abandoned the Labour Party, but more the Labour Party has been abandoning its Left voters for years;
the lesson of Thursday is taking the Leftish for granted only works when there is no Left alternative.
If Thursday changed anything, it made that much, much clearer!
Whilst gaining nothing on their Right.
Will Labour shrink to a rump, simply implode, merge its remnants into Reform?
The "Starmer is a decent man" narrative is clearly nonsense and the bulk of their MPs are cynical careerists. All are participants in their 'authentic zeitgeist whisperer of the (1950s) working class' religion.
There is maybe a niche for a revamped Harold Wilson (of whichever gender) as part of a parliamentary alliance against the hard Right.
It certainly looks like epochal territory.
Yes, interestingly there has been a general rehabilitation of Wilson in the last decade, and so his sort of Labourism may be due for a renewal on the back of that... but whether that would be enough to save Labour from implosion is an altogether different matter.
If we end up with a spectrum, where does a 'Heseltine' party of the centre Right come from? That is another unknown and potentially another part of the dynamic. Spawning from the Conservatives seems no longer an option.
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
LionelB