Firstly, let’s not “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. There is a lot in this report that’s genuinely very useful, and it would be hard to disagree with the vast majority of it’s 43 recommendations.

The issue is more that it doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t grasp what our fight is really about and why it’s so important to win it, nor how we live in a rapidly changing and ever more dangerous world, nor how we will need to think far more laterally to actually surmount all these challenges.

It underestimates the nature of the global threat we now face from a loose affiliation of billionaires and trillionaires, often in control of entire states and more than willing summon the dark forces of nationalism and xenophobia to use to their own ends.

It ignores the fact that our ruling party is linked into and stands accused of colluding with that network of oligarchs. It blissfully assumes the continuation of our democratic norms, despite the fact that the current cadre of hard right Tories are utterly contemptuous of democracy itself: illegally suspending Parliament just last year, and outlining plans on page 48 of their 2019 manifesto for voter suppression, further hobbling the independence of the courts and judiciary and undermining our human rights. It also doesn’t even mention the whole post COVID and No Deal Brexit object lesson in disaster capitalism that the current Government is actively pursuing

A Government that has done and is doing all the above, plus chose to sacrifice tens of thousands of British people in a cruel attempt to use “herd immunity” to save profits rather than lives, ironically managing in the end only to destroy both, is simply not going to allow even a vaguely fair general election in 2024. Not only will we have a “mountain to climb”, but our legs will be cut away from under us and the mountain we should we have climbed redesignated when we’re half way up.

Our current leaders now can’t afford to lose power: to do so would mean not only the end of their political careers but possibly, once they lose the protection that comes with controlling state institutions, even going to gaol.

It barely mentions other existential threats such as climate change or pandemics, nor reflects how rapidly growing concern about these threats could completely reshape our politics, nor how every month of leaving this Government in power costs lives, blights futures and brings us ever closer to unavoidable catastrophe.

Instead it emphasises long term trends and normality, as if it just can’t see the Black Swans nesting everywhere, and possibly doesn’t even grasp the meaning of that phrase.

It under-estimates not only both the point and the power of ideas, but the importance, especially in dark times when people are looking for hope and leadership, of creating the narrative and shaping opinion. Instead it takes a purely “political hack’s” view of the situation: given this statistical analysis of some opinion polls and survey results, what should we be saying in order to gain power? That isn’t the point of power. It isn’t even what the Tories and the hard right in the UK did, for if they had they would long ago have abandoned EU membership as an issue that was, for many years, of only marginal interest to the British public. Instead they formulated Brexit, weaponised it with xenophobia and “minimal group paradigm” and then used it as a Trojan Horse for creating their disaster capitalist dystopia of crippled worker and consumer rights, weak environmental protections and low taxes for the richest.

Crises are often the moments when the future is most malleable. Crises call for vision, not carefully ticking off the concerns of focus groups.

The report doesn’t analyse the threat vectors properly, so there is no talk of us counter-attacking directly. A common background theme is that we will always be over-spent by the Tories. So let’s do something about that over-spending. We should directly challenge the proliferation of non party campaigners and how they are increasingly used to anonymously bypass spending limits during elections. We must also expose and take action on donations. For example, only British citizens can make donations, but, and generally justifiably, this does not prevent citizens with multiple citizenships from donating. However, we could have a list of national citizenships that are considered as potential security threats, with any British citizen who retains one of those citizenships being prohibited from making political donations (so that, for example, Russian oligarchs would at least have to renounce any Russian citizenship before doing so).

We should be prepared, while we still have at least a passably independent legal system, to use it to mount challenges, something we are surely well placed to do with one of the country’s top barristers as leader, and attack not just Tory electoral fraud, but hold them to account in the courts whenever they violate constitutional or human rights or engage in misconduct in public office. Abandoning their duty to protect the lives of the public they are meant to serve with their “herd immunity” policy, although one of the most murderous examples, is just one case in point. We might not win all those challenges, but we would highlight the issues and make it more difficult for the Tories to operate with impunity, especially if we don’t just target the Conservative Party and the Government but also individual Tory advisors and staffers who are complicit with shady practices, threatening them with personal prosecutions and possible financial ruin.

Yes, this is ruthless, and yes, we would have to be prepared for the Tories to counter-attack, and yes, we would take casualties, but we have to be courageous. The days of political norms and niceties are long gone. The death toll as a result of “herd immunity”, if nothing else, should tell us that. We are in the midst of a very lethal top-down class war, and just pretending that isn’t the case is a dereliction of our duty that will also merely guarantee our total defeat in any case.

We should also never lose sight of the fact that the large Tory majority in Parliament is primarily the consequence of our first passed the post electoral system. More than half the votes cast in even the 2019 General Election were for parties to the left of the Tories. Given the extreme threat the Tories pose to our democracy and to the futures, often even the survival, of the vast majority of our population, we should be actively building bridges for an anti-Tory progressive alliance. Arguably it only needs to endure long enough to change the voting system to break the Conservative domination of our politics, which primarily depends on a combination of “first passed the post” and the fragmentation of the democratic socialist and social democrat vote across eight different political parties (counting only parties that took 0.1% or more of the total vote in the 2019 general election and that list democratic socialism, eco-socialism or social democracy under their associated ideologies listed in Wikipedia).

Given the importance of the SNP as a political force, holding, for example, the third largest number of seats in the House of Commons, that means taking both a principled and a pragmatic attitude towards issues around Scottish independence. Clearly the Sottish people have been betrayed by Brexit: they voted in the first Scottish independence referendum on the basis of what is now a false premise. Democratically, it is correct to support the demands of the Scottish Parliament for a second referendum on independence. It’s essential to note though that there is nothing inconsistent in respecting the Scottish people’s right to self determination while still supporting, as the Labour Party, a federal solution to devolution in the UK. In fact, it’s possible to argue that our commitment to devolution is insincere unless we are willing to respect the Scottish people’s right to self determination in the first place, so to support a federal UK and a second referendum is actually more consistent than hypocritically advocating devolution but then opposing the Scottish people’s right to choose their own destiny. We can support the referendum but still campaign against independence. Of course building any progressive alliance will be futile without the SNP, and we couldn’t include the SNP while still opposing a further Scottish referendum. When the right thing to do is also the most politically expedient thing to do not to do so is extremely questionable.

We exist in a “state of nature” with the Tory Government. This is a Government that does not seek to serve the people, or at least not the majority of the British people. Rather it is led and advised by those who think that the people only exist to serve the elites: that “common” people must be sacrificed so that the elites can “move civilisation forward” by achieving whatever they want, in a nightmarish echoing of the types of arguments that were used to justify slavery in earlier times, such as “mudsill theory”. To Nietzscheans such as Dominic Cummings mainstream “Golden Rule” style moralities that involve people respecting the wants and needs of others as much as their own, at least provided that favour is reciprocated, are “slave moralities”. This Government is not only contemptuous of democracy, but exists outside the moral universe of our society. In an increasingly crisis ridden world, where some members of the elites may be tempted to dispense with the bulk of humanity to better protect their own privileges and ensure their own survival, any Government influenced by such ideas is dangerous in the extreme, and simply cannot be allowed to persist. We should not be surprised by “herd immunity” and the tens of thousands of avoidable COVID deaths.

It is best to imagine that we are ruled by tigers in suits. Once we do so, and once we accept that this Government will not respect democratic and constitutional norms, then we realise that expecting anything even vaguely approaching a free and fair election in 2024 is hopelessly naïve. The current hard right cadre ruling our country got there by being prepared to break the conventional rules of political engagement even when the rules were already biased in their favour. In such a situation for us to dutifully follow all the existing political norms to the letter, and to wait patiently for a free and fair 2024 General Election that is actually highly unlikely ever to happen, while tens of thousands more of us perish, whether through austerity or pandemic or whatever else is allowed to hit us next, while the world around us grows ever more threatening due to accelerating crises such as climate change, would be wilfully irresponsible.

In this context we also have to consider non-violent direct action as an adjunct to parliamentary politics. We have to learn the tactics for effective street protest, and build grassroots links to groups such as Extinction Rebellion, where we haven’t done so already. At the same time we have to extend our broad progressive alliance to those parts of the elite that still consider themselves part of the broad moral consensus, even including “softer” former Tories, such as Rory Stewart. When the demand on the streets for an earlier general election becomes otherwise irresistible, we need to ensure that the troops are ordered back to the barracks. Again, having a leader who is also a privy councillor should help with splitting the paternalistic part of the establishment from the ultimately genocidal.

The Labour Together report was based on a false premise right from the get-go: that we are living in “normal” times. Now it has been completely overtaken by events. We should harvest what is useful from it tactically while being prepared to radically rethink our overall strategy.

The Labour Together 2019 Election Review contains much that is worthwhile. Historians will love it: loads of very quotable quotes and pithy statistics all wrapped up in a single, authoritative primary source. The questions remains, however: does this workmanlike document lack vision? Does it amount to Labour Together fighting not the current war, and certainly not the next one, but one that’s already dead and gone?