LONDON — The British Labour Party is in meltdown. After reviving the center-left in the 1990s, and then dominating British politics until 2010, Labour now faces the gravest challenge in its 116-year history. One of the oldest social-democratic parties in the world is fighting to survive; there is no guarantee it will.
Labour’s crisis is a microcosm of the test that confronts social democracy at large. In polling, Labour has fallen to its lowest level in generations. Shortly before Christmas, the party’s support dropped to 24 percent, which if repeated in a national election would mark its lowest share of the vote since 1918. Forecasts suggest that the number of Labour seats in Parliament could slip from the 232 the party won in 2015 to 190 in 2020, its poorest showing since 1935.
The bad news does not end there. In a recent election to fill a vacant parliamentary seat, Labour suffered the humiliation of failing to reach even 5 percent of the vote. In Scotland, where Labour lost all but one of its seats in 2015, leaked internal polling not only put the party a distant third behind the Scottish nationalists and the Conservatives, but also offered this ominous warning: “There is no such thing as a core Labour vote anymore.”
This week, a report from the center-left Fabian Society suggested that the Labour vote could fall in the 2020 general election to as low as 20 percent because in previous elections it has underperformed its midterm polling by an average of 8 points. This would leave the main opposition party with only 140 to 150 seats in Parliament. The report spoke “of insignificance, even of looming death.”
The Fabian Society also estimates that barely half of Labour’s voters at the last election in 2015 remain loyal. The likelihood of Labour’s coming annihilation is reflected in the leader’s favorability ratings among Britain’s politically engaged retirees: They put him a staggering 57 points behind the Conservative leader, Theresa May. This man will never be prime minister.
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Jeremy Corbyn, who is leading a Labour Party that is fighting for survival.

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Yet the crisis within social democracy runs deeper than the failings of individuals. The referendum last year on Britain’s membership in the European Union exposed a deadly rift in social democracy’s increasingly fragile coalition. The problem for the center-left is illustrated in the contrast between the affluent, leafy North London constituency of Hornsey and Wood Green, where more than three-quarters of voters chose Remain, and the once industrial, now left-behind northern constituency of Doncaster North, where nearly 70 percent voted Leave. Both parliamentary seats are, for now, held by Labour.
The irreconcilably different views of voters in Hornsey and Doncaster reflect a widening divide that is eroding the electoral power of social democracy. It derives from the incoherence of a coalition that depends simultaneously on middle-class professionals in ethnically diverse liberal enclaves and less-well-educated, working-class whites in communities that feel forgotten or ignored.
That coalition is now falling apart. The people of Doncaster are abandoning social democracy. The defection of non-college-educated whites from the center-left was a central lesson both of Brexit and the 2016 American presidential election.
None of this should have been a surprise. More than three decades ago, the political scientist Adam Przeworski described the growing dilemma for social democracy posed by a growing middle class and declining number of blue-collar workers. Progressives faced a choice: either stick with appealing to workers and risk defeat, or appeal to the ascendant middle class and risk losing the workers. Most social-democratic parties chose the latter strategy, so working-class loyalty gradually waned.
Today, the dilemma has been sharpened by a further shift, the rise of the new cultural divide that on another level is also cutting across the traditional social democratic base and will, in time, become even more important than the fading distinction between left and right.
This rift probably always existed, but it has been highlighted by voters’ growing preoccupation with migration and ethnic change, trends that were celebrated in Hornsey but loathed in Doncaster. Against the backdrop of social democracy’s fragmenting coalition, the divide over identity and values is bringing once apathetic whites back to politics. New research has found that one reason for the Brexit camp’s victory was its success in mobilizing politically disengaged, working-class whites who did not identify with any party and may not have voted since Margaret Thatcher’s era.
In defiance of Mr. Corbyn’s principles, these voters saw an opportunity to vent anger over their sense of being neglected and their opposition to ethnic change. In 70 percent of Labour seats, they helped to make Brexit a majority view.
Voters like those in Doncaster now reject social democracy because social democrats failed to recognize what the populists did: that left-behind whites are economically protectionist and socially conservative; that they are deeply anxious about economic disadvantage and threats to their identity, values and ways of life. When social democrats tried to respond, they appealed halfheartedly to economic protectionism, while ignoring these voters’ identity politics altogether or clinging to a liberal commitment to open borders. And none of this was communicated in terms that made sense to working-class voters.
This is why Labour and its sister parties are constantly outflanked by populists and conservatives who attack on both fronts. Recent analysis of European social-democratic parties’ electoral performance has shown that a consistent decline set in around 2005 — before the financial crisis, but when immigration was already fueling white anxiety. The trend will accelerate this year thanks to elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany, where polls already put support for the center-left way down.
Social democracy’s electoral crisis has also exposed the left’s intellectual bankruptcy. The Labour Party no longer owns a single area of policy in British politics. When pollsters ask voters about the economy, housing, unemployment, health care, law and order, Brexit or immigration, most say they either support the governing Conservative Party or do not know which party to support. Amid rising inequality and a stagnant economy, the party that was founded for workers does not have a clear lead on any issue. Ideas have left the building.
The question of what is to be done is not easily answered. In Denmark, where social democrats have talked tough on immigration, they maintained support but still failed to halt the advances of the populist right. In France, where socialists tried to stick to principle, they face electoral oblivion, while the nationalist right remains strong.
Since the Labour Party itself is internally divided, with some members of Parliament calling for controlled immigration while their leader doubles down on a policy of open borders, its prospects for repairing its fractured electoral coalition seem remote. Social democracy faced crises and defeats aplenty in the past, but its future was never in doubt. Labour now raises that doubt.
Matthew J. Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ), a professor of politics at the University of Kent and a senior visiting fellow at Chatham House, an international affairs think tank, is a co-author of “Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain.”