The loss to the Conservatives of Sedgefield, a constituency where the Labour was once 25,000 votes, seemed to symbolise the final alienation of the Labour Party from traditional working class voters, whether the Labour Party survives depends on them not mistaking the mistakes of the 1980s.

Momentum, the 40,000 Trotskyite entryist element that took over the party included their planned programme to create state monopolies in the Labour manifesto. John McDonnell declared that nationalisation would take place within a hundred days of a Labour victory. The pro-Brexit, anti-EU militants have a vision of establishing Britain as an independent socialist republic and have been quite methodical in their practice of removing from positions in the party anyone who has had the temerity to question their plans.

Dedicated to a totalitarian vision, they will undoubtedly reinterpret the results of the general election in a way that places the blame upon anyone other than their leader Jeremy Corbin, their strategist Seumas Milne, and the others amongst their number who led the Labour Party to its worst result since 1935. Any group that could present the 2017 defeat as a victory will deal with the 2019 humiliation in even more polemical terms.

The attempt to reinterpret even the most inconvenient truths in such a way that a conclusion is favourable is not a new phenomenon among the British Left. Anyone who remembers the 1983 general election will remember Margaret Thatcher achieving a landslide and returning to parliament for a second term with a majority of one hundred and forty four seats. Labour lost heavily in the election, being reduced from two hundred and sixty one seats to two hundred and nine, fifty-two seats less than in the previous parliament. In terms of the popular vote, the Labour Party polled four and a half million votes less than the Conservatives. Despite their being a resounding rejection of Labour, Left-wing figures interpreted the eight and a half million votes for the Labour Party as the biggest vote ever for a socialist manifesto. Despite the yawning gulf between the votes for the right-wing populism of Johnson and the unreconstructed Trotskyism of Corbyn, the successors of the Militant Tendency will claim that the future lies with them.

The message from the Labour heartlands that became Conservative seats is that they did not trust Jeremy Corbyn. They turned away from the Labour Party not because they had become Tories, but because the Labour Party had turned away from them. First, with the former member for Sedgefield and his Thatcherite policies and, latterly, with the fantasy politics from Islington, the Labour Party lost the support of the communities it was created to represent. Other than dogma, Trotskyites have nothing to offer working people.