Labour lost the working-class vote a long time ago

What’s Labour’s problem? Following its fantastic drubbing at the polls, the most common answer to that question is that the party has for too long ignored its traditional base: working-class voters.

Among media Labourites in particular, those currently writing emotionally unhinged articles about how isolated they feel in this cruel new Britain — bless ’em — this has become the go-to excuse for Labour’s rubbishness in recent years.

Yes, there’s the issue of Tory-backing Rupert Murdoch’s stranglehold on people’s mushy minds, they say, revealing their disdain for tabloid readers. And there’s the apparently irresistible lure of the Tories’ politics of fear, which they believe ensnared a dumb electorate, once again exposing their low view of the little people.

But the main reason for Labour’s decline, according to these sad-eyed scalpel-wielders currently poised over Labour’s corpse, is that the party ‘left behind’ its old voters, ignoring them in favour of cosying up to businesspeople in the Blair years and being too nerdish to connect with them in the Miliband years.

This theory gets things the wrong way round.