Have been waiting a long time for this. My copy was late arriving and it appears to have been in great demand - or poor distribution by the publishers. As always with what I grew up calling the Butler Series, it's the first draft of history; an objective, analytic, dispassionate review of the 2019 GE, the Brexit election which was such a disaster for the Labour Party. It was always going to be a disaster as Labour faced an impossible task - full-throated backing for Brexit would have seen them haemorrhage remainer support and been completely out of line with the sentiments of the vast majority of the party's MPs and members, but supporting remain means losing those key Brexit-supporting voters that Labour needed to gain seats. The tightrope Labour managed to walk in 2017 came adrift this time, and the shifting demographics of support for the two main parties was accelerated. Labour increasingly are the party of the urban, the young, the university-educated and ethnic minorities rather than being the class-based party they were for so long. Added into this, is the toxicity of Corbyn. Of course he has been unfairly traduced and vilified, and his manifestoes in 2019 and 2019 enthused me far more than anything else I've seen from Labour in my lifetime, but many millions more felt differently to me. the Labour party is now back under the control of the right wing of the party, who are now doubling down in their attempts to ensure the left never ever hold power in the party again. I'm not interested in an anti-democratic, left-hating party whose aim is to gain power to ensure there are no socialist changes in the UK. there is already one very electorally successful party that does that, another one is just greedy. Let's see what happens, but it's hard for me to look at some of the awful people in the shadow cabinet and the wider PLP and wish them well. but as Mandelson said, where does the left have to go?
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