A YEAR ago today, the weather was Biblical as my friend and I set off for Hastings on the morning of the election, December 12.

We had a list of probable Labour voters that we collected from the campaign centre, a busy, friendly house, where we were offered tea, coffee and biscuits. Three of us set off in the car with our maps and lists to round up the voters . The weather never improved, and the doors we knocked on were, with a few exceptions, equally inclement. I began to think: had the local party made some kind of mistake?

I had had an inkling that it could go like this over the previous five or six weeks in Worthing where we had campaigned in another south-coast marginal. To begin with, the feeling was optimistic. So many people turned up at the election campaign launch in Shoreham harbour.

But the more potential voters we met, the more it seemed that many were either hostile, wary or had lost all hope of any promise from Labour.

The contrast with the 2017 campaign, when people seemed open to the idea that Corbyn’s Labour was offering something different and hopeful, could not have been starker. What a difference two years could make — two years of relentless attacks on Corbyn from his own side and the media, and the endless Brexit quagmire.

At party conference in September there was a sense of unreality: there were great speeches and cheers from the packed halls in Brighton, but I had a strong sense that the feeling at conference — of hope and socialist passion — was not shared out there in the towns that Labour had to win to get into power. That hope had dissipated, replaced with a kind of grim weariness and cynicism.

When Johnson called the election, it was clear we would be fighting on enemy territory. The year had gone badly with the failed negotiations with Theresa May over Brexit, then the terrible Euro elections when Labour’s vote fell to 13 per cent, only slightly better than the Tories’ result. After that, the Tories ditched May and crowned Boris Johnson to see through the referendum result, to Get Brexit Done.

At a World Transformed workshop event we were asked to come up with ideas and slogans to sell the idea of the second referendum and the socialist transformation to come. There was a naive, student seminar feeling to the event, with no sense that we had to win around ordinary voters, most of whom had voted to “take back control.” How were we going to reach these millions?

Back in the working-class housing estates of Hastings on December 12 it was clear that voters now saw Labour as part of the Establishment that wanted to stop Brexit. Our voter lists gradually disintegrated in the driving rain, just as Labour’s voters had vanished since the list was written.

That night, as the exit poll came in, all cheer in our little gathering of Labour supporters was obliterated. It was worse than anyone could have expected — although I had warned a week before in a Facebook post that we should prepare for defeat and think about how the left could continue its work in the aftermath.

The causes of this defeat have been analysed exhaustively, from a poorly executed campaign to the betrayal of leave voters who in 52 seats swung massively to the Tories, ensuring Labour’s devastating result. Ultimately, Dominic Cummings chose the ground on which to fight, and Labour had no choice but to fight a battle it wasn’t ready for.

But of course, in the days and weeks after the election, as we grieved and licked our wounds, none of us could have imaged what would unfold over the following year. Not only did we face a pandemic that would shut down whatever was left of “normal” life in Britain, but Labour would elect a new leader who would declare war on everything that had been done over the previous five years to return the party to socialism.

So, 12 months on from that defeat, it is hard to see exactly how the great project of democratic socialism moves forward as Labour returns to the centrist, pro-Establishment, top-down politics that dominated the party for three decades.

Thousands of the members who joined in the Corbyn years are watching and hurting as local party officials are picked off by the centrist clique that has seized control of the party. They look to the Socialist Campaign Group and the left-led unions for some kind of leadership and hope.

No doubt, that will come, if not in parliament, then in the country and wider movement. In the meantime, ordinary activists once again face the terrible sense that the greatest betrayal of all is the one inside your own camp, from those who are in theory on the same side, but in effect seeking the permanent order of capitalism and war, and opposing all manifestations of socialism with tooth and nail.

At least now, much more than a year ago, we know who is against us and what they are prepared to do to stop us. They will fail.

After such a cataclysmic year, I look forward to Christmas, and beyond that, December 12 2021. By then, Brexit will have happened, resistance to renewed austerity and Tory corruption will have coalesced, and the empty suit of centrism will be exposed as politically bankrupt.

As Sheffield tenant and Acorn activist Linda Crittenden said this week after the overturning of a heating bill hike by a successful tenants’ campaign: “It shows when ordinary people work together we can change things.”