As previously suggested, no-one knows why Labour lost the election. But here's a guess.
Political times change. I remember the 1970s, when one industry or another seemed to be perpetually on strike. I remember the three day week, the oil crisis and eating dinner by candlelight. There were strikes by miners, dockers, bin men, British Leyland, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Union leaders, men with severe glasses and raincoats which barely covered their bellies, appeared on TV news going in and out of Downing Street. From smoke-filled rooms people were sent out for beer and sandwiches.
My Dad's response to this was characteristically pithy. He said, "They're pricing themselves out of jobs".
Globalisation has put a stop to most of this nonsense. Many years ago a majority of the British public realised that they were competing against people in the Far East who were willing to work in a factory for a dollar a day. They realised that if they were going to keep their jobs they had to remain competitive. Productivity was part of this, and so was wage restraint. Economic reality killed union militancy just as surely as Mrs Thatcher's reforms. No one in Britain can imagine now a return to the bad old days of disruption.
But if this is partly because of an irreversible shift in British attitudes, what if another shift is slowly taking place, making another hole in Labour's intellectual and moral armour?
I think you can divide Britain into two groups. The first believes that in the long run you can have what you can afford to pay for. The second believes that you can have what you deserve, and that if you tax rich people a bit more the numbers will work out for themselves. Most of this first group votes Tory. Most of the second votes Labour.
The nightmare for Labour might just possibly be that the first group is growing and that the second finds itself shrinking and isolated. Certainly the response to defeat last week sounded like a howl of cognitive dissonance, as the liberal commentariat struggled to come to terms with the inconvenient verdict of the electorate.
Some Conservative pundits have criticised this response on the basis that it amounted to "Why are voters so greedy / stupid / ill-informed / selfish?" Personally I don't mind abusing the electorate. An awful lot of voters are staggeringly ignorant, and that includes many who voted Tory. But at a gut level I think that people are reasonably savvy. More of them understand what the deficit is now than was the case in 2010. That's bad for Labour, which thrives on the plausibility of its spending promises. It's just possible that the more we understand the economic realities, the harder it will be for them to get back into office.
It has taken a long time for signs of understanding to creep into Labour discourse. In the 2010 campaign Gordon Brown told the electorate there was a choice between "Labour investment and Tory cuts". After Brown lost, Ed Miliband told us austerity was unnecessary and that there would never be any growth under George Osborne. Then when it turned out the economy was growing and there never had been a double-dip recession (let alone a triple dip), Ed Balls said it was the wrong type of growth. Finally there was an admission that bringing the defecit down was necessary after all, and that we should vote Labour because it would mean "fairer deficit reduction". Against a backdrop of such intellectual foot-dragging, Labour's boast that it had become the "party of fiscal responsibility" just looked bizarre. For this big lie alone Ed Miliband deserved to lose. And when in a TV debate he denied that Labour had spent too much in office, the audience's sharp intake of breath spoke eloquently of public contempt.
I've been asking for years, what does a Social Democratic party do when economic circumstances force the end of generous spending? It seems to me that Labour's fate will be determined by its response to this question. But if there's one location where people in the second group above - the ones who believe public spending is only limited by compassion - tend to be found, it's in the Labour party. When those people believe that the majority of Britons are wrong and they are right, how likely is it that they will change tack?
After the Tony Blair landslide in 1997 I got the 73 bus one glad confident Islington morning down the Essex Road to work, a Labour voter delighted after all those years of Tory sleaze. In the paper the Grauniad's star columnist, Hugo Young, gave his considered judgment. The Tories were out of office forever, he wrote.
Even I, at the high water mark of my infatuation with the People's Party, knew this was bollocks. The Tories would be back. It's hard to finish off a political party. Even the Lib Dems aren't finished, not even now (in fact in some ways it's easier to see a return to power for them than it is for Labour). But if Labour aren't finished, and common sense suggests they're not, they're nevertheless going to have to do some hard thinking in the next few months.
