Some might argue that one or two of the three options set out above involve losing with style, rather like someone publishing a magazine that they want to read but that it turns out few other people are interested in. This means you dont need to worry about what the polls say, or about what the press say, but you can just go for whatever policies you feel are Pure Labour. And if you lose, its because the electorate isnt ready for your party, or theyve been hoodwinked by an evil rightwing press. If only Labour would keep making the case for Pure Labour and debunking the lies of the evil rightwing press, then at some point, perhaps not in 2025, or even 2030, the electorate will finally have been persuaded.
The problems with this are obvious but still worth rehearsing given the way the debate is moving in the party. The first is that you need evidence that the electorate is slowly moving in your partys direction and just needs a bit more persuading over a couple more elections. The 2015 election did see Labour gain 1.5 per cent in vote share, and the Tories just 0.8 per cent. So perhaps that is evidence that the electorate is creeping in your direction, but not in a way that benefits your party under first past the post. As for the evil lies of the right wing press, well, either Labour has to work out a way of increasing the circulation of those left-wing papers that might support its position (though its not as though all of them were particularly helpful to Labour in the run-up to this election, either), or accept that more people in Britain choose to read newspapers that tend to take a centre-right or right-wing view of things and work out a way of engaging with those newspaper readers, rather than suggesting that theyre all morons who are easily duped by a group of people who consistently come bottom in surveys about who the public trust.
