Niall of the Nine Sausages

After the sting of the election defeat, I’ve been doing some initial thinking and jotted down some thoughts. Some of these things may be hard to for some of us to read and were equally hard for me to write (trust me), but as a movement we need to be truly honest with ourselves about what has gone wrong before we try and fix it. Do not underestimate the scale of this defeat. This really is an existential crisis for the party. Our northern base is gone with many seats lost and many more now marginal. There are now only 96 seats in the country where labour have a majority of over 10,000. That means we are possibly not yet at the floor in terms of seats. Our southern and metropolitan gains of the last decade are not yet secure and we cannot rely on them to come through if we pivot in future elections towards a more socially or economically conservative platform to win back the so called “red wall”. The labour party’s only true heartlands remain in Liverpool, Manchester and parts of