Alan Roden: Jeremy Corbyn and his disciples have failed the Labour Party and failed Britain

A Tory MP had been headbutted and punched, and other people in the bar had also been attacked. The Labour MP for Falkirk, Eric Joyce, was arrested, suspended from his party, swiftly found himself in front of Westminster magistrates, and then announced his resignation.

In these halcyon days for Labour before the independence referendum, his seat was the kind of place where their votes were weighed, not counted.

There was a bitter selection fight, with accusations of attempted vote rigging by the left-wing trade unions, resulting in leader Ed Miliband drawing up new rules for Labour membership. To curtail the unions’ power, people could pay just a few pounds to join and vote in leadership elections. That didn’t go well.

A few years later, when Mr Miliband resigned, the new rules led to the shock victory for Jeremy Corbyn. A natural Eurosceptic, he barely lifted a finger in the EU referendum, helping ensure a narrow victory for Brexit in 2016.

Labour’s subsequent inability to form a coherent Brexit policy position finally led to the party’s worst election result since 1935, in the early hours of Friday morning.

Boris Johnson is in full control, with a mandate to deliver a hard Brexit, and the very future of the United Kingdom hangs in the balance.

If only Mr Joyce had not lost his temper that night in 2012, Britain today might be a very different place.

But let’s not allow Jeremy Corbyn and his disciples off the hook. They have failed the Labour Party and failed the country.

It would be very easy for longstanding sceptics of the doomed Corbyn Project to say ‘told you so’. But frankly it doesn’t matter that we were right. What matters is that Mr Corbyn’s catastrophic failings as a leader have guaranteed Brexit happens next month.

‘Told you so’ isn’t going to stop the economic devastation that Brexit will wreak on British communities. It isn’t going to stop the erosion of workers’ rights or bring back the opportunities which will be taken away from the next generation.

Critics are, however, entitled to be deeply frustrated that those who wanted to play student politics and fight a class war refused to listen.

The danger signs were there in 2017. That’s when, contrary to what the hard left will tell you, Labour actually lost the General Election – to the most disastrous Tory campaign in modern history.

Over the following two years, Mr Corbyn further alienated voters by flip-flopping on Brexit before eventually deciding to sit firmly on the fence. He failed to tackle the stain of anti-semitism in the party, and offered the country an illiterate economic vision more suited to the 1970s.

He said the party was going back to its working class roots, but it turns out the working classes prefer Boris Johnson. Just let that sink in.

The party doesn’t need a ‘period of reflection’, as Mr Corbyn has called for. It needs to leave the failed Corbyn Project behind, and remodel itself for the third decade of this century – learning from the way that Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson managed to appeal across Britain in the 1990s, and the way that David Cameron and George Osborne rebuilt the Tories a few years later. Different times, yes, but with the same clear goal that Labour must now aim for: power.

An ideological Labour leadership battle is now inevitable, but if members choose someone in the Corbyn mould then the party truly is over.

As for Scottish Labour, it’s already close to being finished as a consequence of a shambolic, incoherent, disorganised campaign that cannot solely be blamed on Jeremy Corbyn’s deep unpopularity.

It’s perhaps even more frustrating because Scottish Labour has first-hand experience of what happens if you try to appeal to all sides when binary constitutional politics dominate: the disastrous 2015 General Election, which left it with one seat (albeit on a considerably higher share of the national vote, it should be noted).

It also has first-hand experience of what happens when you take a clear position on the binary constitutional debate: the 2017 General Election, which produced six gains on the back of a strong ‘no to indyref2’ campaign.

Those gains involved an incredible amount of hard work, careful research, and smart strategising. They weren’t an accident.

All six of those MPs elected in 2017 have now lost their jobs. That is a damning indictment on the Scottish Labour leadership’s decision to align itself so closely to the Corbyn Project. The only survivor, Ian Murray, won by doing his own thing.

But so much more went wrong for Scottish Labour in this campaign than just toeing the Corbyn line. It became an appendage of the UK Labour Party, as if Johann Lamont’s description of a ‘branch office’ was an instruction, not a warning.

Whatever Richard Leonard said about opposing a second independence referendum was irrelevant when Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell made it clear they would give in to Nicola Sturgeon’s demands.

And organisationally, Scottish Labour was a mess. The loss of highly respected election veterans such as former General Secretary Brian Roy was keenly felt.

In the final days of the campaign, resources were being ploughed into Motherwell and Wishaw, with many in the party utterly convinced of victory. In the end, the SNP’s majority was over 6,000.

The strategy, if you can call it that, was to win back thousands of Yes voters who would see socialism as a better option than independence. As some basic focus group research would have revealed, they didn’t.

And, just as the buck stops with Mr Corbyn across the UK, so too in Scotland must the Scottish Labour leader take responsibility for this result.

Richard Leonard has reversed the gains made by Kezia Dugdale and led the party to two humiliating election results – the European election results in the summer and now this calamity.

It was his decision to transform Scottish Labour into a branch office; his decision to surround himself with Corbynites; his decision to shun the talent within his MSP ranks.

And it was Mr Leonard who told his MSPs that ‘never again’ would Scottish Labour run a campaign like it did in 2017. Hubris, thy name is Richard.

The party motto under Mr Leonard’s leadership is ‘real change’.

That is precisely what the party now needs.

Alan Roden is a former communications director for Scottish Labour