After Thursday there will be those desperate to dance on the Labour Party’s grave.

An outright defeat or a slump in Labour’s share of the vote will herald speculation that the Labour Party is destined to go the same way as the Liberal Party. The demise of the Liberal Party has been well-documented, notably in George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, written in 1935. Dangerfield, who lived until 1986, witnessed the decline of the once-mighty Liberals into a party capable of meeting in the back of a taxicab, and a century dominated by the Tory and Labour Parties. The Liberal Party won its greatest landslide victory in 1906, with 49 per cent of the vote and a 125-seat majority. But, as Dangerfield wrote: ‘From that victory, they never recovered.’

Since 1900 the party that replaced the Liberals, the Labour Party, has suffered great reversals and won mighty victories. In 1931, it looked like the party was over. In the face of a global depression, Ramsey Macdonald led Labour MPs into a coalition with the Conservatives to form the National Government. In the general election that year, the remaining rump of the Labour Party won just 52 seats. In 1935 despite some recovery, Labour won just 154 seats. Yet a decade later, Labour MPs marched into the voting lobbies to nationalise the mines and establish the National Health Service (NHS) following the post-war landslide. In the 1950s Labour once again languished in opposition. In Must Labour Lose? published in 1959, Mark Abrams and Richard Rose speculated that with a declining class bass, affluence, and the new welfare state, Labour might be destined to extinction. They wrote ‘Its promises to conquer economic distress and crises by planning based on public ownership mean little now that the terrible economic depressions of the past appear to have been left behind.’ In 1964 a modernised, media-savvy Labour won, gaining seats from the Tories in Brighton, Buckingham, Gravesend, King’s Lynn, Putney, Wandsworth, Watford, and Wellingborough.

Following defeats in 1979 and 1983 Labour was once again written off. In 1983, Labour finished with 27 per cent of the vote, a couple of points ahead of the Liberal/SDP Alliance (almost identical to this week’s opinion polls). In the mid-80s you couldn’t move for essays, articles, conferences and books proposing that the Labour Party was finished. As early as 1978, Eric Hobsbawm’s Marx Memorial Lecture on ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ raised the spectre of changing patterns of work and demographics leading to Labour’s death. The group around Marxism Today pursued this line. The Limehouse Declaration issued by the Gang of Four – Williams, Owen, Rogers and Jenkins – in January 1981 stated that Labour had moved away from its ‘roots in the people of this country’ and that ‘a handful of trade union leaders can now dictate the choice of a future Prime Minister.’ Twenty-eight Labour MPs defected, along with people such as Polly Toynbee, Vince Cable and Daniel Finkelstein, to join the Social Democratic Party with the aim of destroying the Labour Party. In 1997, albeit a little later than we might have liked, Labour won a majority of 179.

The point is that the Labour Party has proved capable of surviving great existential threats. At least three times in its history it has been written off by received wisdom and the commentariat, only to go onto great election victories and successful, progressive periods of government. When Nick Clegg declares that this election is a ‘two horse race’ between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives (like an Eton versus Westminster School debating competition) he is merely repeating the folly of his predecessors who sought to break the mould and bury Labour.

There is no iron law of politics which decrees that Labour should always exist, of course. Each of Labour’s recoveries from terrible setbacks was the result of hard work, and a rejection, eventually, of indulgent self-immolation. The job of progressives in each generation is to keep Labour electable, radical, and in touch with the shifting ambitions and aspirations of the people of this country. That job will become more important after Thursday.

Labour has no future as a left-wing socialist party anchored in the trade unions. If there was a popular yearning for that, Arthur Scargill would be prime minister. We have no future as a party of the overweening state, with we-know-best politicians. But as a party of decent-minded people who want to see steady improvements in their material conditions and the condition of their country, of people who value their place in a wider society and world, and of people who share a feeling of compassion and duty towards one another, Labour has a future as long as humankind’s. Win or lose on Thursday, Labour’s progressives will need to mobilise and organise, to press for policies which meet the challenges of our times, to resist easy blame and answers, and to support the new Labour MPs we’ll have just elected.

Policies, leaders, manifestos and ministers come and go, but the Labour Party is bigger than all of us, and especially those who would rejoice at its destruction. On Friday we may all be celebrating. If not, we should take succour from our own history, and perhaps also these words from William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball:

‘I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.’

Photo: Downing Street 2010