The left is really, really bad at elections. In the last fifty years, the British Labor Party has had one successful candidate for prime minister. Right now there is a diary on the reclist arguing that running on a leftwing platform is why labor lost. The fact that anyone is taking this argument seriously is part of the problem. In 2017, Labor saw stunning pickups with the same candidate and same manifesto. In 2017, Labor supported Brexit. In 2019, Labor supported a new referendum on leaving the EU. In 2017, Labor picked up a surprising number of seats, in 2019 labor got destroyed, losing multiple seats that voted for Brexit in the prior referendum. The problem is not the manifesto.
This should be a wakeup call for Democrats. The politics of the western world are realigning around race. Studies conducted after the 2016 US elections showed swing voters to be socially conservative and fiscally liberal. The critical swing voter is a racist who can be bought off. This is the new center of western politics. The same study showed the old center, fiscally conservative but socially liberal, to be almost non-existent.
Corbyn simply got outbid. What Labor was offering could not compete with leaving the EU and rounding up a bunch of immigrants. What we should be learning is that we must find a way to appeal to the new center without embracing racism. That’s probably some combination of more socialism and figuring out some way to keep race for dominating media coverage.
But, if what you’re saying about the British election is that it shows the dangers of moving too far to the left, you simply are not accepting what the election results are telling us. And this is why the center-left keeps losing.