Labour can come back from the brink. But it seems to lack the will to do so | Martin Kettle

In 1983 Neil Kinnock urged the party to unify – and people listened. The mood in today’s smaller, less confident Labour appears more fatalistic

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History suggests that the temptation to write off the Labour party’s prospects is both recurrent and unwise. In 1910, even Keir Hardie concluded that “the Labour party had ceased to count”. Yet less than a generation later, in 1924, Labour formed its first government. Decades later, some of Britain’s most distinguished political scientists wrote a book about the 1992 election whose doom-laden title asked: Labour’s Last Chance? Yet a mere five years later, in 1997, Labour won one of its largest electoral victories of all time.

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The left is unusually bad at asking itself really difficult questions about its approach to politics at all, ever

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