THERE’S a long drive ahead tonight, but it’ll be worth it. At the other end of the road is Manchester and my daughter who upped sticks when the first opportunity arose — not that I blame her.

Still, she remains within striking distance of Glasgow for now, and for that, I thank her. It’s a city I’ve been visiting for 30 years, hair thinning and head spinning as the city grows taller with every successive trip.

Searches for its centre have always led me over the border to Salford eventually, though I’ve bumped into Engels a couple of times, standing there in the privately owned public realm that’s been his home since he took refuge from Ukraine nearly a decade ago.

I’ve even wandered Gorton a little in the past, where, by the time I get down there, the vanquished campaign teams will be engaging in that most soul-destroying task of taking down the placards with a hangover.

Been there.

Putting placards on lampposts was banned in Glasgow not long after the Glasgow East by-election, in 2008. What had been regarded as a seat where Labour generally weighed the votes had returned an SNP MP, and an extraordinarily right-wing one at that. Within 48 hours, Bob Gillespie and his trusty mutt Dandy were driving a car down the Edinburgh Road while myself and another young victim climbed the lamposts and threw the Labour placards in the back.

At the end of the shift I threw myself into the motor before being pushed back out. “You’re sitting on my boy!” hollered Bob as he whisked a copy of the NME from under me. Until that moment, I’d somehow managed to be the only person in Glasgow who hadn’t joined those particular dots.

That was 18 years ago, my daughter barely walking. Scottish Labour refused to learn any lessons from that episode, an error masked for a while when the seat was won back with the Labour swing in Scotland in the 2010 general election, but displayed brilliantly in the 2011 rout at the hands of the SNP at the Holyrood election, in the referendum in 2014, when Labour seat after Labour seat voted for separation, culminating in the 2015 decimation.

As the birthplace of New Labour, Scotland naturally led the way in the “there’s nowhere else to go” for the working-class strategy, never letting defeat get in the way.

Scrambling, again, for a third place in the Holyrood elections in May, it stands there like that lone Japanese soldier on an island still fighting the second world war, seemingly unaware the world moved on decades earlier.

If there are any Labour types wandering around Gorton and Denton this morning taking down the placards, wondering what just happened to them, I say look north not just to explain what occurred, but precisely how not to deal with it.

They can choose to wrap themselves in the comforting idea that candidate selection was the issue, that Andy Burnham could have saved the day and spared Keir Starmer a few blushes before forcing him out and dispatching him as ambassador to Washington, but the many who actually walked the streets and talked to actual human beings know better than that.

By-elections are not run by the many though; they’re run by party machines. Labour’s machine in this case was run by the deputy leader who also happens to be a local MP. The same Lucy Powell who lit up our TV screens after the 2017 general election with her absolute bafflement at the surge in Labour support after a uniquely positive campaign.

The very thought of it.

In the aftermath of the defeat, Powell offered the ceremonial waffle about a “positive campaign,” but it was clear to anyone paying attention that it was built on smear and fear that shamelessly appealed to ignorance and did the honest activists and the candidate a disservice in the process.

The Greens and Reform certainly don’t come out of it squeaky clean, but the sight of the Labour campaign screaming about more “small boats,” or attacking Greens for daring to put out a leaflet in Urdu pointing out the Labour government’s complicity in Gaza were lows, but sadly not new ones.

At least John Davidson had a valid excuse for his racist and hurtful language at the Baftas — more than can be said for Labour’s poster vans in Gorton and Denton.

This is what happens when people who have built entire political careers on Peter Mandelson’s maxim of the working class having “nowhere else to go” run out of squares to triangulate. Rest assured they never run out of ideas though — largely because their next will be their first.

I’m sure it’s all fun and games for those who engage in this nonsense, but sooner or later people are driven to discover other options — good, bad or indifferent — and sooner or later you end up out of office or under arrest.

Labour were defeated by two parties — yes, even Reform — which claimed to be interested in tackling the issues that matter in the material world.

Reform’s solutions to the problems of housing costs, stagnant wages and endemic poverty are no solutions at all of course — they’d slash workers’ rights in a heartbeat — but people drawn into this are not stupid. What they are is desperate for something to happen, desperate for some sense of power over their lives, and desperate for a future better than today.

Many of us from time to time can point the finger at the Thatcher era for snatching those hopes from working-class lives, but doing that while offering the same policies in a different order is a recipe for alienation perfected.

Who am I kidding? It’s not alienation perfected, it’s alienation honed.

The narrative may well be that Mandelson and his ilk just happened upon the world as it is and put themselves to work not to change it but to bend it a little, but the tragic truth is that they positively shaped alienation into an edge sharp enough to draw blood from anyone who might challenge it as anything other than the natural order.

It’s a natural order where smear campaigns are positive campaigns, where mass poverty is the price for the bond-trader’s holiday, and where debt slavery is freedom, and in place of class there’s always chauvinism.

In Scotland that’s just as manifest now with the ruing SNP as it is in Labour, the merest murmur of disapproval met with the accusing finger at London or Cardiff, while in England — it seems to me — we have the growth of the pseudo city-states, and all led by West Wing cosplayers.

I have no particular issue with a bit of civic pride, but not the classless kind.

I will confess to having a soft spot for the Tony Wilson phrase “this is Manchester, we do things differently here” the city adopted, but while its urge to thrust two fingers at the world appeals, it is no truer than the fairy stories Scots tell themselves about being more socialist than elsewhere.

Manchester’s workers have a fine and radical history of standing up to those who would cut them down, but so do the great cities Liverpool, Swansea, Glasgow, London, and many more besides.

Every town in the land has a worker, every worker a history, in every history the foundation of a great future.

In every corner of the land working-class children still want for an education worthy of them, still cry when their bellies are empty, their parents still want for the time and money for a life with them, and their grandparents still weep for a stolen future.

It’s a long road back, but if Labour cannot hear those cries, if it cannot dream, if it refuses to restore that future, then it doesn’t deserve one itself.