And this is why I'm not a parliamentary socialist. the labour party, even its left, does not have the political culture to fight tooth and nail, in a quite despotic way in fact (and let us reclaim a certain kind of despotism as a positive here without hesitation) to institute political change. I predicted in 2015 that this project would end in failure, long before the media sneers started.
The problem is much broader than corbyn, labour, as you rightly say. But let us not hesitate from saying what is apparent to those who are not English. The orderly independence of Powell and Powellism, that is to say, the anglo-saxon gens living within its own means has been victorious. The average Brit is socially conservative with a moderate degree of (what is perceived as) soft paternalist economic leftism. Nationalisation but only to a rudimentary extent. National spending but not for those on benefits, and the 'undeserving poor' etc. Austerity as a mechanism for instilling British patriotism.
Part of why right wing tories such as Truss and to a lesser extent Badenoch are taking a vaguely indifferent line to the British empire is not because they are gun toading nostalgics but because they rightly see the empire as needing to have been abolished to fashion the modern British national subject. When one is an imperial power that tends to create a core/periphery division and this was especially exaserbated by many of the ex-colonial countries having much tighter communal bonds (it's no coincidence that many of our parents from middle east, India, Caribbean etc etc have a victorian level of conservative morality that would horrify the average white tory even.) Because, the essence of colonialism isn't just cultural imperialism (that is surface level) the actual economic integument of colonialism is to preclude the abolition of the dominance of landed property, I.E: to retard the development of the capitalist state and create a class of bourgeois intellectuals and informants who utilise the colonial bureaucracy to retain their socially elevated positions of caste. Again, this should be no surprise when looking at the British far right criticising pakistanis and muslims for retaining their village-like ways, but as orderly and obedient british subjects they don't see that it was their own politicking which created this despicable, parochial situation.
Now, the likes of Thatcher, and now Sunak, Boris, Braverman, Badenoch, Patel, etc, etc, want to push Powellism that one step further. They want to create a black British and an Asian British subject. We can see how successful they have been at this. Not very. which is why racist rhetoric has been on the rise, the few model asians and blacks being contrasted to the majority, for which a hysteria of utter contempt has been deployed since the 80s.
Unfortunately, labour has been complicit in this to a very large extent. Only until labour takes full stock of this, going way back to post WW II reconstruction (approved suppression in Malaya against national liberation movement, under the Atley govt, etc) can labour have any chance of actually offering a sensible counterpart to the tories and avoiding the death traps of the media. But they will not, because they are constitutive of this post-imperial British subject. The majority of labour members do not know about (for instance) the information research department which still persists in ricu to this day, a cold war campaign of misinformation, lies and slander that could only make Vladimir Putin utterly blush.
Lydon was wrong. there is a future for this country. It is to be sunk into the deepest depths of the ocean.