My increasingly powerful feeling is that what the left needs is the next Clement Attlee or Margaret Thatcher. Someone with the political clout to drag the current framing of political debates--which is still currently unabashedly right-wing--back towards the left, and what progressive politics can achieve. The problem with looking at the current electoral map and trying to figure out how a genuinely progressive voting platform might have done is that since 1979, political discourse in this country has been framed almost exclusively by the right wing. When the Labour party start talking about how to balance the budget and bring down the deficit, they've lost the debate. They arguing against an opposition's lies, so it's an argument in bad faith, and the Tory party can just turn around and 'a-ha!' them--'the Labour party doesn't even try to dispute the narrative that the deficit was too high...' etc.
Cowtowing to the framing of the Tory party, insisting that Labour need to move further right, plays right into the Tory's hand. It might win them short term popularity, but it will do it at the expense of permanently shifting and cementing the debate around the centre-right, which just makes the increasingly radically right-wing economic policies of the Tory party seem ever more sensible and responsible. This has already happened. Policies that the Tories would have baulked at as being irresponsibly dangerous in the 80s will be passed during this term. Why is that? Because the Labour party drifted too centrist, and now those policies are within reach of the Tories.
It's really not easy, as a young, progressive, left voter to take much hope in this defeat. I honestly believe that any hope of a progressive, prosperous, left-wing Britain in my lifetime died yesterday, and the drift rightwards towards a country of increasing inequality, economic injustice, and social deprivation now seems pretty much inevitable. Game over, the right wing won the battle for Britain's future.
