It is early in the argument, but there is at least a signal in the noise. Labour’s needless experiment with the proposition that Britain had made a significant shift to the political Left has ended in predictable disaster. The vast cloud over the Labour party does, though, have a silver lining. The defeat is at least so emphatic that it is not credible to argue that its approach has worked. Or that a similar venture may work in 2020. Or indeed, ever.
To continue the metaphor (a pathetic fallacy being precisely what Milibandism turned out to be), there is a sense in the Labour party today that the storm has passed. There was a night of terrible and incessant rain, thunder and lightning but morning arrives with a feeling of freshness. The authors of the disaster have gone, either resigned or despatched, and the Labour party can at least begin again. Unfortunately, it will have to.
So far Chuka Ummuna, Tristram Hunt and Liz Kendall have offered their analyses of the defeat. Dan Jarvis has done so too although he will not be standing for leader. So has Tony Blair and neither will he. All of them share a basic thesis, which has been echoed by Peter Mandelson. Labour talked incessantly about the top 1 per cent of the country and often about the bottom 10 per cent but hardly ever about anyone else in between. The party gave the impression either of not caring about wealth generation or of being actively hostile to it. Labour seemed incapable of crafting a message for anyone with aspirations to become moderately prosperous. Its political message was a zero-sum fallacy—we are in favour of the poor who are being swindled by the rich.
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The demise of the big beasts
What Labour's next leader must do
It is encouraging that the early analysis is correct. There is not a lot more to say about why Labour lost. It fielded an unpopular leader mouthing a narrow and rather miserable conception of the country. Labour did not ever sound as if they liked Britain very much. Britain then returned the compliment.
There is a lot of work to be done now to work out the ramifications of this analysis. It is one thing to know why you lost and quite another to know how to rectify it. However, the nature of the analysis does imply one set of solutions and not another and, at least in the early stages, the argument is slipping away from anyone who was a Cabinet Minister in the Blair and Brown years. The two probable candidates who answer that description are Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper.
Ms Cooper might be able to associate herself with most of that analysis. Her husband, Ed Balls, was in fact the sensible voice in Labour economic policy, insisting the party knew where its money was coming from. Mr Balls knew in his heart that Labour sounded anti-business and he knew too that was a disastrous position. Mr Burnham, though, feels more implicated in defeat. The campaign centrepiece was meant to be his tendentious claim that the NHS was being privatised. “24 hours to save the NHS” said Labour although more than 24 hours on the NHS appears still to be there, much the same. Mr Burnham will have to offer his own analysis of why Labour lost. If it is the same as the younger intake of MPs then his own contribution to the defeat seems rather odd. If it is different from them, then it will be dangerously wrong.
The temptation to take the indulgent and self-destructive option can never be discounted in the Labour party. That was, after all, what the party did in 2010. There is a good chance it will not do so this time. The 2015 defeat was truly catastrophic. It is time for the Labour party to get serious again after an interlude of pleasing itself.
Once, when Mark Twain and his good friend the writer William Dean Howells were leaving church one Sunday it started to rain heavily. Howells looked up at the clouds and asked “do you think it will stop?” “It always has before” replied Twain.
