A couple of years ago, scientists at University College, London discovered that low expectations are the key to happiness. At a personal level, this makes a lot of sense. However, no one would be impressed with a school or a hospital trust or a business which deliberately set itself low targets in order to feel self-satisfied when they meet them. The same should be true of a political party. But Labour set the bar so low that merely avoiding apocalypse in last Thursday’s election results, can now be defined as ‘remarkable success’ by shadow dhancellor John McDonnell.

Even McDonnell could not dispute that Scotland was a disaster. How Labour finds a way back is unclear, but the theory that we lost Scotland because we were not left-wing enough for Caledonian tastes has to be officially declared dead. All the parties that bested us, including the Scottish National party, stood on a platform to the right of Labour.

By contrast, London really was a success. The emphatic nature of Sadiq Khan’s victory was a tribute to an excellent campaign from an excellent candidate. But London should always have been a Labour city. Its population is young, ethnically diverse and has a disproportionately high number of renters, all factors which favour us. Once Boris Johnson’s ‘I’m a Celebrity, Make me Mayor’ show had finally trundled out of town, it would have been a shock if Labour had not won back City Hall.

A better overall picture of Labour’s performance comes from looking at the results in the rest of England and Wales as we acquired the ignominious honour of being the first opposition party to lose councillors in over 30 years. Measuring success in terms of changes in council seats is problematic as this is dependent on results from four years ago. We were up against the highwater mark of Ed Miliband’s time as leader of the opposition, and many people have pointed out that Labour is therefore doing about as well as Miliband at his best. This misses the staggeringly obvious point that Miliband went on to lose in 2015.

It is incredibly difficult to win a general election from opposition. Since 1980, the only leader who managed to gain an overall majority from the opposition benches was Tony Blair. In Blair’s first year as leader, local election results gave Labour a 22 per cent lead over the Tories; compare this to the one per cent lead that Jeremy Corbyn has managed. David Cameron’s first year in charge of the Tories saw them reach a 12 per cent lead over the Labour government, and bear in mind that Cameron did not even secure a majority in 2010. Miliband managed a two per cent lead in 2011 and went on to lose. Michael Foot in 1981 only managed a one per cent lead and lost. Iain Duncan Smith also had a one per cent lead in 2002, and was kicked out before he could lose. The best of the bunch was Michael Howard in 2004 who roared to an 11 per cent lead in his first year as leader and slashed Labour’s majority in the subsequent election but still did not defeat the government. The truth is that – if history is a guide – then there is a yawning chasm between Labour’s performance last week and where an opposition needs to be if it expects to gain power.

The standard riposte is that Labour’s problems are all down to disloyal members of parliament undermining the leadership and that if only they would stop carping and complaining then we would be back on track to trounce the Tories. It does not provide a reasonable answer to the question of why there has been so much carping in the first place. Instead the ‘Bitter Blairite’ has been invented, a creature so rabidly committed to Corbyn’s destruction that it is prepared to betray its party, its constituents and put its own political career in jeopardy by making Labour so unpopular. At no point does it occur to the proponents of this theory, that if a leader cannot convince his team that he can steer them to success, then responsibility for this failure lies with the leader and not with the team.

Labour needs to stop pretending that Thursday’s results were a stepping stone to government and admit that they were a message that something is seriously awry. If we fail to do this, then nothing can change. The leadership needs to provide its critics with a coherent and credible plan as to how we move from our current poor position to future victory. It needs to address legitimate concerns such as those raised by new MPs Jo Cox and Neil Coyle, rather than shouting at them for criticising. Simply relying on a strategy of creating low expectations that can easily be exceeded may be keeping some people in the Labour party happy at the moment, but this will be little comfort to the millions of British people who will be denied a Labour government in 2020 as a result.

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Christabel Cooper is a member of the Labour party and writes for Progress here