If this article on the BBC based on the report into Labour’s December 2019 massive defeat is to be believed then I can’t see any way back for Labour. Here’s part of the BBC report from yesterday in italics with my comments in plain text.

The BBC said:

The coalition of voters that propelled the party to a landslide victory in 1997 has been fractured – yet Labour would need a similar swing now to deprive the Conservatives of power at the next election.

Unless Boris Johnson’s Conservatives really really bugger up and I mean get involved in a massive Suez or Winter of Discontent style scandal, I can’t see Labour getting anything like that sort of electoral swing. The Tories big plus at the moment is that Labour is in such a bad state that any failure or scandal that could see the Tories lose, would have to be massive.

And the report suggests that right now, rather than suggesting “things can only get better”, they might get even worse.

It said: “Labour cannot be complacent about the seats we currently hold, and we must be mindful that without fundamental change, there is further we could fall.”

There are 58 seats across the country which only require a small swing away from Labour to the Conservatives to be lost.

I’ve been watching UK elections for a long while and that’s an incredible amount of seats to be at risk of falling to the Conservatives. Let’s just say that Boris Johnson loses 20 seats at the next GE, if these 58 Labour seats fall to the Tories then it will still leave the Tories with a majority. If Mr Johnson hangs on to his current majority and adds even half of these seats that are said to be at risk then we are looking at a majority of 109 which would be smaller than Thatcher’s 1983 majority and Tony Blair’s 1997 one but still impressive. It would take Britain into ‘electoral dictatorship’ territory as the government would be all but unassailable in the Commons just as Margaret Thatcher’s second term and Blair’s first term made them. Whilst I have no love for the Labour Party this worries me as for a democratic system to flourish there is a requirement for there to be an effective opposition that can challenge the government if necessary. It’s not good to not have an effective opposition.

Given the long-term trends set out, which are particularly stark in some places, there is no evidence these tendencies are abating.

The tendency of people to not want to vote Labour can only get worse unless Labour change.

So, what is to be done?

Well, the report seems somewhat stronger at diagnosing the underlying problems than providing the solutions.

There are 43 recommendations. Some are obvious, such as making better use of volunteers’ skills and better support in target seats.

These would perhaps get the party at least on the foothills of that political mountain.

Some suggestions are organisational and practical – how to deliver a message, rather than what that message should be.

Several are focussed on improvements to the digital strategy, and some are about changing the way activists behave on the doorstep – trying to persuade people, rather than identify and mobilise a diminishing number of supporters.

Some of these suggestions would be good for any other major party, but this is Labour we are talking about here. Changing the style and making better use of resources along with perceived failures by the governing party was what in my view helped the Tories in 2010. Persuading people to vote Labour on the doorstep sounds good but the problem for Labour is the party product itself. It’s no good improving the message about the product if the product itself is seen as bad. People are not going to buy a dog turd peddled by a door to door salesman just because the dog turd has been lovingly and expensively coated in gold leaf, the potential customer will look past the sheen and still see a dog turd. The problem for Labour is that many of us do see Labour as that gilded dog turd.

Labour could end up like the Liberals, a party that once led governments with substantial majorities and turn into a minor party that is now, as the Liberal Democrats, little more than a rest home for political fraggles and oddballs. It doesn’t have to be like that for Labour, they could change but whether the Labour activists would accept the necessary change to policies and outlooks is another big question.

Labour could recover by admitting to the public that many of the policies that it had espoused since 1997 were wrong. It could admit that it’s policies on migration, multiculturalism, welfare, the NHS, transport, education etc, were driven by a Left wing dogma that they now reject. The party could refocus and become a defender of British workers and British culture, they could drop the wokeness and minority pandering that plays well with its metro-Left activists but just looks like anti-Britishness to many ordinary former Labour voters. They could promote assimilationism rather than multiculturalism which would play very well with former Labour voters who are not the racist monsters that the metro-Left characterise them as.

What Labour need to do is to remove from the party’s policies all the wokeness, minority and Islamic pandering that is driving Labour voters away. It needs to be a party in favour of free speech, free assembly, free and honest voting and a party that backs British workers working hard to make a free Britain better. I’d vote for a Labour party that guaranteed my right to free speech, to not be overtaxed, to not promote or subsidise negative behaviours, that treated every British subject equally, which was fully behind concepts of personal responsibility and which did not demonise those with social conservative views. Labour need to go through as big an upheaval as Blair’s Labour went through when it abandoned Clause Four and with it the desire to nationalise industries. Sadly for the Labour Party I can’t seen anyone in the current Parliamentary Party nor any of the higher profile activists in the wider party who would be willing to even begin to countenance such radical changes. The next General Election looks as if it will be Boris Johnson’s to lose as I can’t see Labour making the necessary changes to allow it to compete with the Tories and will only win by default of the Tories screw up the country big time.