Political forecasting has suffered a number of embarrassments recently (as another of our magazine’s contributors, Declan Molloy, has written about here), and it is with one of these that our story begins. Pundits had predicted a Labour victory in the United Kingdom’s 2015 general election, perhaps propped up by support from the Scottish National Party in the event that Labour did not form a majority in its own right. Defying the polls, the Conservative Party went on to boost themselves from a minority government (in coalition with the Liberal Democrats) to a majority in their own right. When Ed Miliband resigned from the Labour leadership the night of his election loss in 2015, no analyst or commentator predicted that the party would enter into an historic split – a marginalised minority leftist grouping of Labour’s parliamentarians would be delivered control of the party by a coalition of hundreds of thousands of party members, affiliated trade union members and registered supporters. The Labour Party itself has very little ideological character as an institution. It has no …