THE battle lines which will determine the outcome of the next general election are becoming clearer. And they are inside the Labour Party. The critical divide is over the seats Labour stands to hold or lose with a smaller swing away from it than the comfort zone predictions indicating the Tories have too huge a mountain to climb, this time. It is possible, without using Labour’s heartlands too much for granted and taken worse-case extrapolations, that as few as 24 seats could decide the outcome. The present Labour leadership, and some percipient Blairites, have woken up to the warning, delivered in Tribune in June last year that, as we put it: “Labour is looking down the barrel of a gun in the south of England”. Half of Labour’s most vulnerable marginals are in the south-east of England and London.

The question, one put to the Cabinet last week in one of its new corporate management “break-out” political sessions, is: what can be done about it? The answer fundamentally divides the old, die-hard Blairites and their obsession with mythical “Middle England” and the progressive left and its mission to re-connect with the four million voters who have abandoned Labour since the 1997 election. Chasing the myth without addressing the interests of the latter will lose the election, deservedly so because “new” Labour will have abandoned those for whom the party was created to serve.

Former Cabinet minister Charles Clarke, who, unlike his fellow uber-Blairites, is, to the surprise of many, showing signs of wanting a genuine dialogue with the party and the left, has drawn up a “doomsday list” of Labour MPs who stand to lose their seats if just 7,500 voters switch at the next election. Taking redrawn boundaries and a swing away from Labour of just 1.5 per cent, he says, would lose the Government its majority. Even if this alarmist construct were to hold water, the prescription for dealing with it from the Blairites is suicidally wrong. Right-wing outriders currently regrouping to forge the shape and agenda for the election, and who dangerously may harden voters attitudes even this far away from the election – John Hutton, Hazel Blears, James Purnell, Stephen Byers, Alan Milburn and Mr Clarke – crucially fail to take into account the broader demographic which lies behind the crude statistics. A survey shortly to be published in full in Tribune shows that in many, if not most of these seats, there is a reservoir of thousands of votes that might be seen as naturally Labour, but which are being withheld at the polls. A demographic breakdown shows a preponderance of public sector workers are represented in this grouping. They fit into the pattern, shown in the small print behind the headlines of the three recent polls putting Labour around 12-13 points behind the Conservatives. Of the roughly 45 million voters in Britain, 33 per cent “identify” themselves with Labour, 25 per cent with the Tories. But an alarmingly small proportion of the Labour identifiers indicate they will definitely vote Labour while an overwhelming number of Tories are determined to stick with their party at the polls.

Labour needs policies that will attract those voters back to the party, at the same time as holding its support in the traditional heartlands in the north. Yet those with a grip on policy and the campaign message are seduced by the illusion that “Middle England” must entail an overriding appeal to the affluent and Tory-leaning vote. Hence Mr Hutton’s rallying call for “more millionaires” and Ms Blears’ decree that Britain is a “nation obsessed with crime and immigrants”, that Labour must be the “party of the affluent” and that it has to “win seats in the south as well as Sunderland”. It is as though they want to win Hampshire and Surrey rather than hold Sittingbourne and Sheppey or Crawley, where schools, healthcare, housing and public sector wages matter more than the local millionaire quotient. A Budget which made five million poorer taxpayers worse off while doing nothing about non-doms underpins the extent to which the Government is getting the answer wrong.

Gordon Brown needs to win back the 12 per cent lead he had when hopes of change followed the change of leadership. It won’t be done by flying a Union flag over every privatised school and hospital.

Labour can win without losing its soul or it can lose its soul and the election too.