There is a fabulous long form article over on Unherd on wither Labour following the Batley and Spen byelection by Paul Embury who is a Labour party supporter but also a critic of the direction that the party has taken. In this article Mr Embury looks at what the very narrow win in Batley and Spen means for the party. He makes some valid and serious points about the future for Labour and I would strongly counsel that readers take the time to read Mr Embury’s piece in full as it sets out what Labour needs to do to change and why the party might not make the changes that it needs to make to become credible again.

Mr Embury explains that there is no room for triumphalism over the Batley and Spen result. He states that a party that has been in opposition for sixteen years and which aspires to govern the nation should have done much better. Mr Embury also criticises the dearth of talent that exists in the Labour parliamentary party which puts the party in the position of having no credible or electorally attractive alternative to Sir Keir Starmer.

Mr Embury also questions whether Labour’s political priorities have divorced the party from the people who used to vote for them or who may well have considered voting for Labour in the past.

On the subject of Labour’s future Mr Embury doesn’t believe that the party is dead but he’s extremely pessimistic about that future.

Mr Embury said:

That the Labour Party is no longer an objection of affection for vast chunks of the British working class is beyond doubt. That millions among that cohort now actively dislike the party and everything it stands for is equally indisputable. And while, in matters of political discourse, it is important at all times to resist the temptation of hyperbole, it is still very difficult, even — perhaps especially — in the wake of Batley and Spen, not to draw the conclusion that the game might genuinely be up for the Labour Party; that the situation is now irrecoverable and we are witnessing the inexorable decline of an organisation that has been a fixture of our national politics for 120 years. In 27 years as a member, I don’t think I have ever felt such a sense of fatalism about the party’s prospects.

At one point it was possible to immediately answer the question as to what British political party best represented the interests of the ordinary working man or woman with just one word. In the past the answer to that question would have been ‘Labour’. That’s not the case these days. Labour are not the working class’s party any more, in fact Labour seem to me to be the party of everyone but the working classes.

Mr Embury went on to diagnose some of what ails the Labour Party and I find it difficult to disagree with. Mr Embury said:

The truth is that, over the past 30 years, the Labour Party was unknowingly digging its own grave. The promotion of identity politics, the embrace of a militant and uncompromising cosmopolitan liberalism, the drastic oversteer to those living in our fashionable cities and university towns, the elevation of globalism over the nation state, the sneering contempt for the small-c conservatism of large parts of the country, the rapprochement with market fundamentalism — all these things helped to drive a wedge between the party and its traditional base. At the same time, the party itself was undergoing a radical transformation: the professional and managerial classes began to dominate, while the old blue-collar element was increasingly sidelined; the priorities of provincial Britain were subordinated to those of the metropolitan elites.

Batley and Span threw into sharp relief the depth of the mire into which Labour has sunk. The contest itself was a damning indictment of the party’s trajectory — the natural consequence of an aggressively identitarian politics which divides people into ‘oppressors’ and ‘victims’ on the basis of their biological, religious or ethnic characteristics. Every old hatred seemed to rear its head during the campaign, from anti-Semitism to homophobia to Kashmir and Palestine. It would be dishonest to claim that Labour was a victim in all of this; on the contrary,it was up to its eyeballs in it, even resorting in one leaflet to what appeared to be naked racism. “We are far more united, and have far more in common, than that which divides us,” said the constituency’s former MP Jo Cox in her maiden speech to the Commons. Those words seem like a bit of a sick joke after the by-election.

Yes indeed. It is in large part the embrace of identity politics and the take over of the party by the Middle Class Left that has done for Labour.  Labour was always a coalition between the working classes of for example Hull and the middle class theoretical Leftists of Hampstead. However in the past both knew their places and worked together. Now there seems to be very little working class support for Labour and the Hampstead left has taken over. As the Middle Class Left has embraced identity politics and pushed it on areas that were traditionally Labour strongholds, it has driven away Working Class voters. This driving away of Working Class voters has got much worse in recent years as Labour are the party primarily identified with stuff that is seen as wholly negative by former Labour voters, things such as mass migration, pandering to confessional groups, a decline in education standards and the removal of hope from those who previously looked to Labour for hope.

Please read the whole of Mr Embury’s post and weep for what Labour have done to themselves and to the nation.