ANDREW ROBERTS: Having lost its fourth General Election in a row, there is only one thing the Labour party can do now - abolish itself

OK, let's make a pact,' says Homer to his family as they enter a theme park in the long-running TV show The Simpsons. 'This is gonna be the best vacation ever, or we'll all agree to disband and join other families.'

Having now lost its fourth General Election in a row – and lost it comprehensively – the Labour Party ought to consider Homer Simpson's threat and abolish itself. If individual members want to go off and join other parties or even set up new ones, that would be fine, although probably just a further waste of time and effort.

It is futile to keep alive an institution that had already fulfilled its historic function by the start of the last decade, a party that will not form a majority government again, and even if it could, ought not to.

Founded in 1900, Labour lived up to its name for the first 110 years of its existence, representing the working men and women of Britain in Parliament and government. In its recent conscious decision to try to become a middle-class party, however, it severed its roots with the people who had put it in power three times under Tony Blair.

Having now lost its fourth General Election in a row – and lost it comprehensively – the Labour Party ought to abolish itself. L-R: Richard Burgon, Angela Rayner, Rosena Allin Khan, Dawn Butler and Ian Murray take part in the first party deputy leadership hustings

Having now lost its fourth General Election in a row – and lost it comprehensively – the Labour Party ought to abolish itself. L-R: Richard Burgon, Angela Rayner, Rosena Allin Khan, Dawn Butler and Ian Murray take part in the first party deputy leadership hustings

No one born in the last 100 years aside from Blair has led Labour to victory in a General Election. The reason Blair was so successful was because he publicly abjured socialism by abolishing Clause Four of the Labour Party's constitution, which committed it to 'common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange'.

Socialism as a creed is today followed by fewer than 15 per cent of the population. If, as seems likely, the socialists win the present civil war in the Labour Party by defeating the social democrats, the party will simply repeat its 2019 electoral debacle. Far better to wind it up.

For all the while, the demographics are working against them. There were nine million trade unionists in 1969 – today there are 6.23 million. The share of the vote won by Labour in the first five Elections from 1945 was 47.8 per cent, 46.1 per cent, 48.8 per cent, 46.4 per cent and 43.8 per cent.

Hardened Leftist Rebecca Long Bailey is one of the two front-runners to lead a party that has an estimated 300,000 socialists and Momentum members on its books

Hardened Leftist Rebecca Long Bailey is one of the two front-runners to lead a party that has an estimated 300,000 socialists and Momentum members on its books

Yet in the last five Elections it has polled 35.2 per cent, 35.2 per cent, 29.0 per cent, 30.4 per cent and 32.2 per cent. That is structural – it will not change any time soon. Morgan Phillips, a general secretary of the Labour Party in the 1950s, used to say that the party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. Today, however, the exact opposite is true. And for the hardline Momentum Left to try to cohabit with the Blairite social democrats any longer is a cruelty to them both.

Whereas there was a genuine sense of workers' solidarity when Britain had great industries based on shipbuilding, steel-making, coal-mining and so on, that is simply not the case when so many people make their livings behind word processors.

Hardened Leftist Rebecca Long Bailey is one of the two front-runners to lead a party that has an estimated 300,000 socialists and Momentum members on its books. But what happens then? Ms Long Bailey apparently wished to appoint as her campaign manager Alex Halligan, a Stalinist who has been photographed at the Durham Miners' Gala with a badge depicting the assassination of Leon Trotsky by Stalinist agent Ramon Mercader in Mexico in August 1940. The badge also sports the words 'Goodnight Trotskyite', a triumphalist rhyme that will make any Stalinist smile and any democrat shudder.

Does Ms Long Bailey think the British people aren't watching this kind of behaviour with the same bemused shock as when they heard that Jeremy Corbyn refused to sing the National Anthem with the Queen present at a Battle of Britain commemoration service?

Joseph Stalin killed six million people and imposed totalitarian terror on hundreds of millions more. Anyone who supports Stalin's policies should be considered way, way beyond the pale of civilised discourse and politics in this country, or indeed in any democracy.

The Labour Party has done plenty of great things for Britain in its history. It supported Churchill patriotically in the Second World War, created the National Health Service, took us into Nato, inaugurated the Open University, brought down John Major and kept us out of the euro. Yet even the most recent of these achievements was nearly two decades ago.

Labour can now only pray that Brexit turns out to be a disaster for Britain. Pictured: Jeremy Corbyn

Labour can now only pray that Brexit turns out to be a disaster for Britain. Pictured: Jeremy Corbyn 

Terms such as 'bourgeoisie' and 'proletariat' have never meant much to the British people, who are resolutely sensible and practical when it comes to their politics. All surveys demonstrate that class consciousness is dropping year by year in Britain, which is another problem for a party that relies so heavily on class envy and resentment. If you want to see a genuinely classless political party, look at the new Tory MPs from the so-called 'Red Wall' seats of the North East and Midlands.

Labour can now only pray that Brexit turns out to be a disaster for Britain. It's their last throw of the dice. But even that desperate hope will be swiftly recognised as foully unpatriotic by an electorate that hopes to muddle through Brexit at the worst, and, at best, to thrive with its new-found freedoms.

So the answer seems obvious for members of the Labour Party: disband and set up two new organisations – a Marxist Momentum party and a Social Democratic Party. Or join the Lib Dems or the Greens.

Whoever becomes the next Labour leader is going to feel that politics is very much like banging his or her head against a brick wall.

Far better to call time and allow the Labour Party to join the Whig Party, Country Party, Liberal Unionists and Empire Loyalists in the annals of British history, political parties which had their time in the sun, but disappeared once their work was done.