The Labour Party is in a significantly stronger position than almost any other European social democratic party. Low bar, I know, but it must be said.
Not really. Spain, Portugal and the Scandinavian nations certainly have more influential social democratic parties right now. Labour has a higher base vote, but that's not a sensible comparison to use when comparing FPTP and PR jurisdictions.
It's also the case that a) a substantial proportion of Labour's vote at the last GE was driven by tactical pro-European voting, only moved towards Labour quite reluctantly during the campaign, and can't really be seen as 'belonging' to Labour as such. Take that away and you're looking at 25-27% or so, and that b) most voters understand how FPTP works at a constituency level which means that to understand support you can't just look at vote shares. If there's massive consolidation behind the other party (and my God did we see a lot of that last year: the scale of anti-Labour voting in most of the country ought to be seen as quite shocking) then that's often a sign of the party in question being deeply unpopular. FPTP has always encouraged 'negative' voting, but it has taken widespread partisan dealignment for the impact to be visible in Britain.
Yes, PSOE, PS, and some (but not all) of the Scandinavian parties are in a better shape right now. But as for estimating what "real" Labour support is, I'm not sure what we're supposed to take away from that. If we should discount the people who voted Labour in 2019 out of pro-EU sentiment, then by the same token shouldn't we also discount the pro-Brexit Tory vote? I'm not saying we
should do so, mind you - it's still an open question whether 2019 is the new normal alingment-wise or whether things will revert to normal once Brexit is (more or less) behind us. But whether or not that's the case, in both situations Labour still has enough of a base to unambiguously be one of the two major parties (2019 is proof enough that the LibDems will never supplant them), which means it has a pretty decent chance of coming back to power at some point in the next decade. You certainly can't say the same for the SPD or PS.
