For forty years Labour have been relying on a voting bloc built through unionised workplaces and the broader institutional apparatus of organised labour. Thatcher tore this world apart and Labour never bothered to repair it.
The younger voters who were drawn to Labour as a radical and transformative project in 2015-19 do not identify with the party in anything like the same ways as those formed pre-1979 did. As Labour moves right they might defect far more rapidly than older voters did after 1997.
"They have nowhere else to go" said noted political genius Mandelson about working class voters. It wasn't true then and it is much less true now. Nationalist, municipalist, secessionist and environmentalist parties will make inroads everywhere, would be my guess.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that the current management don't much care. Saving the ship looks like hard work. And if it sinks they and their friends can still hope to be washed up in the paradise of corporate public relations.
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