On a heady morning in May 1997, dazed from lack of sleep, I made my way to work up the Essex Road, Islington on the top deck of a No.73 bus. It may well not have been the morning after Tony Blair's landslide election victory, but might have been the morning after that: for I was reading a column in the Guardian - of course - by Hugo Young, reflecting on Labour's historic triumph.
At the time Young, now long dead, was the Graun's big shot columnist. I wish I could remember his exact words, but their thrust was plain. The Tories, he wrote, are now finished. Forever.
Even then, euphoric at Blair's victory, I remember thinking, "Oh come on. Life's not like that. Nor is politics".
As I write this Theresa May is about to be installed as PM after a mercifully truncated leadership campaign and the Tories are the only plausible governing party in Britain. Young was wrong. Tory exile from power lasted a mere 13 years.
On the other hand Labour's NEC met last night to establish whether its leader Jeremy Corbyn, hated by the majority of his parliamentary colleagues, needed their support to get on the ballot paper to contest Angela Eagle's leadership challenge. The NEC decided Corbyn could run as of right. This morning it appears that Owen Smith MP has thrown his hat in the ring too, an act of incomprehensible political self-harm.
Labour has been virtually wiped out in Scotland. The EU referendum result appears to confirm what the 2015 election suggested - that the party is now losing its core support in the north and midlands to UKIP. So is Labour finished?
In 1997 the Tories had merely lost an election. Labour's position is far, far worse. But actually I think it's even worse than the most of the party realises.
For me the overarching lesson of the 2008 crash was that our economy had been dependent for too long on borrowing, both public and private. Labour briefly ran a surplus inherited from the Tories, but in about 2001 Gordon Brown began to spend. Even while the economy was growing, he ran a counter-cyclical counter-Keynesian spending splurge. Public spending nearly doubled under Blair/Brown. The bankers assisted Brown mightily by lending to any Tom, Dick or Harry with a job. The economy boomed, and private debt levels rocketed.
Now the bankers must take their share of the blame, but people forget to ask what would have happened if they had behaved responsibly. Answer - the boom would have come to a halt even sooner. The 2008 crash distracts by its apocalyptic nature from the underlying reality, which is that our standard of living - as private individuals and as consumers of public services - had been kept artificially high by borrowing from future income streams. As Frank Field wrote long before 2008 (I paraphrase), "In future, public services will have to be provided for less money, not more". After George Osborne became chancellor his much vaunted austerity succeeded only in halving Britain's deficit. In other words, we are merely racking up debt at half the rate we were doing when he became Chancellor in 2010. We are borrowing about £1.5 billion every week just to stay afloat.
The gap between our ability to pay for our standard of living and our ability to fund it has widened, as globalisation has sent manufacturing jobs abroad and growing longevity has increased strain on pensions and the NHS. The days of Gordon Brown's lavish spending increases are gone. I suggest they will never come back. You can argue whether that's a good or bad thing till you're blue in the face, but it would be pointless because even if you would like them to return, the money is not there.
I think Labour supporters are divided into roughly three groups. The smallest group contains people like Frank Field and Maurice Glasman who recognise the financial realities. The largest group thinks 2008 was largely the bankers' fault and that without the crash we'd still be tootling on as before (but this group, in which I'd include the overwhelming majority of the PLP, is slightly at a loss as to how to improve on Tory solutions). The last group includes the hard left entryists of the Corbynite persuasion. They think there's a magic button which can be pressed - spending, printing, borrowing, taxing the rich - which will get the state's coffers filling again. They are fantasists of course, but the certainty and simplicity of their prescription, its la-la-not-listening to the harsh realities of economic and social circumstance explains its appeal to a growing of Labour supporters. Hence Corbyn and his Momentum chums.
Labour's problems are worse than it realises because even if this last group can be seen off - and events of the last few weeks make that seem a slim hope - the others have no intellectually defensible or practical answers to the problems facing Britain. You may hate the Tories all you like, but their policy of bearing down on public spending and trying to encourage business to generate the taxes which will make Britain's public finances sustainable has at least the merit of coherence (it also, coincidentally, chimes with our own experiences as citizens in trying to run our own lives). When you add together that - in contrast to Labour's mediocre offerings - they have a new leader with a long history of performing competently in one of the great offices of state, it's difficult to see how Labour are going to claw their way back into contention.
At this stage the proposition that Labour are in deep trouble seems like a woeful underestimation of their problems. Unlike Hugo Young I wouldn't risk saying Labour is finished as a party. In politics things change of course. But I think they'll have to change quite a lot before Labour can form a government again.
