What would a Tory wipeout mean for Labour?

If the Tories are destroyed, British politics will change. What does that mean for the country's leading left of centre party?

Bloody hell.

There’s little else you can say to poll after poll after poll predicting not just a Labour win but a Tory wipeout. It’s almost inconceivable. I am not even sure I can bring myself to believe the more cautious end of the results. No one can. It is almost unimaginable that the most successful political party in history could be on the brink of not just historic collapse, but extinction.

Two pieces about why the Tories have found themselves here I found particularly interesting. This from Jonn Elledge on the causes of partisan loyalty and the way the Tories have surgically undermined each of these for their 2019 voting coalition and this from John Burn Murdoch on the instability of that coalition and the failure to deliver on the contradictory promises made to them by Johnson.

When the stories of this election are told, there will be a lot of focus on Sunak’s incomprehensible decision to skip out early on D-Day. I suspect that for some of the few remaining Tories, a comforting narrative will start to pervade that the Tories’ loss is not to do with the party at all, but with Sunak’s appalling lack of political nous.

They are right, of course, that Sunak and those surrounding him are really, really, really, REALLY bad at politics.

But the Tory rot goes a lot deeper. It goes back to Cameron and Osborne and their austerity which was widely seen as smart politics at the time (not by me - though I freely admit that I and pretty much every other Labour commentator got our anti-austerity messaging badly wrong). It goes back to Thatcher and the deregulation revolution she unleashed that has meant four decades of companies feeling unfettered by toothless overseers which has led to shit in our rivers and seas, trains not running and no one caring, social housing (or housing of any tenure) not built because land is more valuable than lives and 4.3 million children living in poverty even as 70 per cent have at least one parent in work.

But this is not a post about the Tories. There is plenty of speculation about their potential demise, their potential future paths and the choices that they will either make or avoid.

This is a post about what Labour looks like in a world where the Tories lose this badly. What I think that will do to the party at all levels.

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