Labour is in the throes of an existential crisis which it may not survive

I still remember the shock on people’s faces when the exit polls predicted a Labour wipe-out in Scotland – five hours later and the party that was once even more dominant than the SNP had but a single MP in Scotland. It was devastating. I signed back up again so that I could vote for Keir Starmer in the 2020 leadership election. I wasn’t particularly enamoured with him, but I was persuaded he was the right person to bring stability and purpose back to the party. How wrong I was, and how terrible he is, both as party leader and Prime Minister.

I tried – God knows I tried – to like him, or at least tolerate him. I even read his biography by his friend Tom Baldwin to try and understand him. A man who likes Northern Soul can’t be all that bad, I wrote in these very pages. But, despite an astonishing election victory in 2024, Starmer has proved himself to be unworthy of the stewardship of the Labour Party and incapable of rebuilding the country, on its knees after nearly 20 years of chaos.

Friends at Westminster message me in despair at his inability to make a decision, the bedlam at Number 10, and the plotting by Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham and Angela Rayner.

“He can’t last” they said, only weeks after he was elected. “Rachel [Reeves] is worse”, some insist of the first woman chancellor. “We’re finished if he doesn’t go soon,” is a constant refrain, one which led directly to Makerfield and this week’s by-election.

Jon Healey’s resignation on Thursday may have further weakened Keir Starmer’s authority, but if the self-styled ‘King of the North’, Andy Burnham, wins the by-election in a few days’ time, Starmer is finished. With Burnham back in parliament, he cannot avoid a leadership election, which he will not win.

Even if Burnham loses to Reform, there will still be a leadership election. Wes Streeting is confident he has the support to trigger one, and the soft left which anointed Burnham will field a candidate. Ed Miliband? Shabana Mahmood? Angela Rayner?

But while a new Prime Minister may give Labour a temporary bounce in the polls and re-energise its backbench MPs, I fear the party is in the throes of an existential crisis which it may not survive, at least as a serious electoral force.

Arguably, I have been here before. I burst into tears in a newsagents on the morning after the 1992 election when Neil Kinnock lost to John Major. The Sun newspaper may have claimed that it was its coverage “wot won it’, but I was convinced that Labour could never win again, with or without tabloid support.

Even after a decade, I still feel nauseous when I remember the long night into the morning of Friday 8 May 2015, as the scale of Labour’s defeat became clear.

And I was convinced that Jeremy Corbyn with his hard left fantasies would destroy the party, but thankfully there were enough social democrats left to rescue it, with a little help from Boris Johnson and his 2019 election victory.

But now, as the country faces unparalleled economic and social challenges, I fear that the Labour Party, the great reforming force of the 20th century, is spent.

The party that gave us the NHS after the Second World War; that embraced the “white heat” of technology in the 1960s; transformed our society with a slew of social policies, from the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act to its successor the Equality Act of 2010; the party whose Chancellor and Prime Minister had the authority and skills to rescue the world economy from collapse in 2008. That party is done.

Today’s Labour Party stands helpless before the populist tide that has seen Scotland and Wales elect nationalist governments. At Holyrood and in the Scotland Office, Scottish Labour’s leadership is comatose in the wake of last month’s election defeat.

Across the UK, Labour barely acknowledges, let alone understands, the anger and insecurity that has pushed working-class communities towards Reform. Or why middle-class ‘progressives’ feel at home with the Greens, as they once did with Labour.

It has no strategy to deal with the reality of an electorate offered five or six parties, instead of only two. It has no narrative to even describe the fundamental changes that have happened to the economy, let alone craft a new set of governing principles and policies to meet the challenges of the mid-21st century.

And as the world becomes even more unstable, a Labour Prime Minister cannot find the political and personal courage to support our defence efforts.

In 2009, Greece’s centre-left party Pasok won a landslide victory with 44 per cent of the popular vote. Three years later, after the country’s near economic collapse, Pasok polled 13 per cent in two successive general elections. Greece’s once-dominant party was almost completely wiped out. Today, even though it was elevated to the official opposition in late 2024, its support remains at around 13 per cent.

Political scientists now use the term “pasokification” to describe the collapse of traditional social-democratic parties, eclipsed by populist movements. Is that what we are witnessing today – the end of Labour as we know it?