For the second time in just over a year, I find myself sat on an early morning train from Wolverhampton to London, contemplating the results of an election, having spent the previous night watching in horror as hope, after a brief sojourn through uncertainty, turned to dread.
On May 6th 2016, I found myself sat in that train carriage despising my fellow travellers. "How could you do this?" I silently asked. "How could you have voted for another 5 years of austerity, of increasing inequality, of an even more smug Cameron as the leader of our country?"
I thought my fellow travellers were idiots and I despised them for it.
As I sat on that train, I remember thinking that this was as low as any political event could take me. After months of pouring over polls that suggested Ed Miliband would be our PM by Friday morning, the cocktail of shock and despair as we were served a Tory majority was difficult to bear and, I thought, as bad as it gets.
Yet even as I wallowed in my pitiful prostration on that train, at the back of my mind I knew we'd get another shot in 5 years time and then the country would see sense and put it right (obviously this hope was pre the election of Corbyn!) Once voters used their heads, instead of swallowing the headlines of the Tory press, surely 2020 would be different?
But today it's different. This time it's final. This time the vote changes politics forever.
Now better minds than mine will unpick the implications of the vote; how the United Kingdom may unravel, how the EU will collapse, how national politics in England has disintegrated. But right now, I find myself looking at my fellow travellers, many of whom will be Labour voters, and half of whom will have put their cross next to 'Leave' yesterday.
Why did so many of them ignore the pleas of the majority of the Labour movement and put their faith in the the public school Leave crowd?
Unlike 2015, I don't find myself despising those voters. On my cast list of who to blame, the voter comes way behind Cameron, Corbyn, Gove, Farage and a whole host more.
All those Labour voters in the North, in Wales, in the Midlands- you know what, I understand your decision to vote out. I completely get it. I get the disenchantment with the way things are. I get the unease over immigration, housing, jobs, the NHS.
The political classes only realised these concerns too late.
This has been growing for many years, but your politicians continued to take votes for granted. You have been left behind and, until UKIP started posing an electoral threat, your fears dismissed as bigoted by those who claimed to represent you.
In the aftermath of 2015 many spoke about needing to learn the lessons of that election and also of the Scottish referendum. Maybe even then it was too late, but the efforts by the Labour Party have definitely been too little.
The leave campaign spoke to traditional working class Labour voters in a way Labour has failed to do for years. This vote isn't just a rejection of the 'status quo' as the Labour referendum script is briefing this morning. It was explicitly also a rejection of the Labour of the recent past, and to say that Jeremy Corbyn, the same man who was arguing for unrestricted migration just last weekend, understands why Labour voters punted for Leave is either an act of delusion or is laced with irony.
For years Labour has left these voters behind. The Labour leadership, increasingly drawn from the it's metropolitan-London elite, neglected its core and in the UK, like in the rest of the western world, the discontent this has bred has nurtured the rise of the populist right.
It might already be too late, even if it's not Labour is in last chance saloon. It needs to learn to speak to its core fast, or it's all over.
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