IT'S A CONSERVATIVE EPOCH:

Labour's plight is similar to other traditional centre-left parties on our continent. Once their leaders could rely on a powerful alliance of middle-class progressives backed by the massed ranks of working-class voters to win elections. Their parties should have been boosted by the flaws of neo-liberalism that were exposed first in the financial crisis of 2008 and now in the pandemic. Instead, as the United States veers towards social democracy under its latest president and even Johnson turns into a cheerleader for the nanny state, the brothers and sisters of socialism find themselves rebuffed, rejected and sliding into irrelevance across their European heartlands.

Look across the Channel and you can see many members of the centre-left family are struggling to balance the interests of progressive people in thriving cities and university centres with working class voters in communities that used to be their bedrock but now often feel abandoned and resentful. These are parties that were firmly-established political forces in their countries and shaped their societies. But in this age of anger, insecurity, social media and populism they find themselves assailed from all sides, soiled brands weighed down by their past and hesitant over their future. They end up looking like lumbering dinosaurs from another age as they struggle to evolve fast enough to traverse the drastically-altered political terrain.

In the first decade of this century, these centre-left parties won national elections in Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Portugal and the United Kingdom while they were the main opposition force in Denmark, France and Holland. Today their politicians lead just five governments in the European Union while these parties have collapsed in some of their important homelands, including our own. This phenomenon of decline even has a name -- "Pasokification" -- after the Greek party Pasok's vote share crashed from 44% in 2000 to less than 5% the last time it stood alone in 2015, falling in three years from 160 seats in parliament to 13.

This was seen as something unique, a left-leaning party crushed by imposition of extreme austerity, yet there are other examples to instil fear in Labour strategists. In France the socialists took the presidency with Francois Hollande in 2012, only to be squeezed into fifth place in 2017 with a crushing 6% of the vote leaving them far behind the centrist winner Emmanuel Macron, the far-right Marine Le Pen and even trounced by veteran leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

The party slipped even further into sixth place two years later in voting for the European Parliament as the Greens surged into third. Meanwhile in the Netherlands the Labour Party -- beset by internal divisions and challenged by insurgent greens, liberals, hard-left and populist right -- lost three-quarters of their MPs in the 2017 election and then failed to regain any ground in this year's contest two months ago.

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