The recent British election had 17 million voters supporting ‘Remain’ parties and 15 million supporting ‘Leave’ parties, which probably reflects the balance if there was a referendum on leaving the European Union. Even so, Britain is leaving it.

One conclusion is that the Front Runner British electoral system is broken; those of us in an MMP regime are not surprised. It is harder to see a political path which mends it.

A second conclusion is that Jeremy Corbyn utterly failed to provide the leadership to unite the Leavers or even the Left, condemning it to another five years in opposition. It is even argued that some Tory leavers voted for the Conservatives because they simply could not contemplate Corbyn as prime minister.

Even so, replacing the Labour leader with someone more competent is not going to solve the underlying structural problem. The Left has lost its direction, in most other countries as well – Australia, America, France, German ... The problem is a worldwide one. Focusing on the British Labour Party misses the international dimension.

Not that we should ignore the British experience. One ponders on the collapse of the ‘red wall’ in the north of England where constituencies which from time immemorial voted for Labour, voted for Boris Johnson this time. What may be particularly surprising is that Labour’s domestic manifesto was targeted on them; I leave others to develop how many traditional Labour voters may have voted against their best interests. It is surely a signal that British Labour has lost its way, failing to connect with its traditional base. Leftish parties throughout the world have done little better.

To understand what has happened we need to go back to the rise of Labour and Democratic Socialist Parties in the nineteenth century; there was nothing like them earlier, which tells us that something special was happening then.

It was, of course, a massive change in the political economy of the West. You may characterise it as the experience of industrialisation and the rise of modern capitalism; Karl Polanyi called it ‘the great transformation’, the increasing dominance of market society.

The transformation eventually raised material standards of living and perhaps more importantly created opportunities which our ancestors could not dream of. But it involved an enormous upheaval, in which many people suffered.

From one perspective the rise of the Left was a moral response to that suffering. We can never forget the moral indignation of the Left; the pulpit is never far away from the soapbox. But there was also an analytic dimension to its thinking.

The best known analysis is that of Karl Marx, whose economics is, or should be, a part of every economist’s training (together with that of the other great economists of his time). His thesis was that the rise of industrialisation-capitalism was a damaging experience for the proletariat but eventually it would benefit them in a transition to Marxian socialism.

However Marx did not provide the foundation for the analysis which underpinned democratic socialism. One is struck when reading the democratic socialists’ nineteenth and early twentieth century writings by their vigorous engagement with Marxian analysis but they disagreed with much of him. Moreover, they were deeply engaged with the economics of the day and incorporated it in their thinking. (Then it was called ‘political economy, and had a wider brief than much of today’s economics.)

Their important difference from Marx was that they did not believe that the material forces of history would guarantee that the proletariat would benefit. They saw the need to actively engage – including through parliamentary processes – in order to modify the system to benefit everyone.

In many ways the democratic socialists succeeded; the welfare state is one of their achievements, another is mass democracy and the supremacy of the rule of law. But the success has misled them. Today’s Left – their descendants – now define their role as defending the past gains coupled with a strong moral indignation when things go wrong.

These might make sense if there was not continued turmoil in the political economy. In one sense it is a continuation of the nineteenth century transformation but it useful to recognise that the current phase involves new issues;, environmental degradation, globalisation, inequality and the ITC revolution. They have long been there – Gutenberg was an early example of the impact of increasing access to information – but today they pose more intense challenges.

I do not have identity politics on the list. Aside from the inequality dimension it involves primarily moral issues; they are important but they do not belong to the analytic traditions I am referring to. I meet people into identity concerns who proudly tell me they know no economics – or express views on the economy which confirm their ignorance. Obviously I am not discounting identity politics, but it belongs to the conservative tradition of the Left; that we have solved the big issues and all there is to do is to tidy some things up and defend the past gains.

This conservatism contrasts with the tradition of the Left that it was progressively engaged with the evolving challenges of the time. Notice I have used the term ‘challenges’ rather than ‘threats’, that is, they also create opportunities. So we need that nineteenth-century democratic vision of adapting the current system to take advantage of the opportunities while minimising the damage.

So the ‘progressive’ wing of the Left has engaged with the environmental challenge (although one wishes it better mastered the underlying economics). It expresses moral indignation at inequality but barely understands the underlying analytics (illustrated by their tenuous grasp of salient facts like the difference between wealth and income). With a few exceptions, there is little thought about how a small open economy engages in an increasingly globalised world. We have barely thought about digitisation (but the economics of information is very difficult).

How well does Corbynism– or any other Left-wing party for that matter – address those issues? Too often the Left does so much in defending the past than, pursuing its nineteenth-century tradition of tackling the future. The focus is on identity issues and situations offshore; neither of which is of great interest to the red wall.

It is the Right which has done better at obtaining power and implementing their policies, even if their solution is ‘anything goes’ underpinned by a theory of the human condition which is too individualistic and neglectful of the social for my (and Polanyi’s) taste. From this perspective, one is not surprised that the Right is so dominant in rhetoric, in policy thinking and in the incumbency of power.