For some in the Labour Party, the United Kingdom leadership election is going about as well as every other recent election. The voters are in a funny mood. The sensible candidate is struggling. The silly candidate is doing far too well for comfort. Alarm bells are sounding on the SS Blairismo.

Some of this is authentically funny. As it turns out, people who insist that Labour must “listen to the voters” really don't want to hear what swathes of the party's own electorate are saying. Like leaves on the line, these are, it seems, the wrong kind of voters.

Then there's the homily on “what Labour has to do to win”. This is a venerable text. It depends on the truism, delivered like a mystical insight, that nothing is possible without power. It proceeds via the ancient oath that “next time” – always next time – the party will stay true to itself. But that's not the fun part.

The fun part involves taking guidance on how to win from a bunch of the great and good whose track record wouldn't impress a three-legged nag. People who have served in Cabinets and shadow Cabinets, run campaigns, or expostulated in the Lords, now claim to know what's been going wrong and how it can be put right. If their advice is spurned they might – I told you this was funny – stage “a coup”.

They blame Ed Miliband for May's rout, of course. They sound like their remaining counterparts on what Labour calls the left: “If only the leadership had listened to us, all would have been well.” It's a thin excuse whose sole merit is that it cannot, logically, be disproved. Some of them were part of “the leadership”. Some were the little Napoleons of Scottish Labour's grande armee during its long march to oblivion. Still they feel entitled to call the shots.

In one breath, they pronounce anathema on the silly candidate. In the next, they demand that Labour should begin to win back the trust of voters by showing itself to be a responsible party of government. This, weirdly, is defined as making no great fuss over what the Conservatives are up to. It involves Her Majesty's Opposition abstaining rather than opposing when the poor and vulnerable are at risk. Fearless abstention: it's the responsible way.

Harriet Harman was Mr Miliband's deputy. When she was not enlivening the election campaign with her pink minibus, she was as close to “the leadership” as it was possible to be. These days, you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Determined to “listen to voters” – and on no account tell them they might be wrong – the acting leader decrees that the best way to win trust is to concede the Government's Welfare Bill without a fight.

OK: there was an amendment, duly defeated. There was a rebellion by four dozen Labour MPs who could not stomach Ms Harman's sagacity. And there was, yet again, a shrill chorus from those who agree with the acting leader's analysis of the party's plight. “We cannot help the poor if we are out of power,” they say. “To win power we must prove that we can be trusted on the economy and on benefits. So, er, tough luck on the poor.”

Labour could not have defeated the Government the other night, of course. That's not really the point. The point is that the people being victimised by George Osborne will be no better off if Ms Harman's pragmatism pays off and her Labour returns to power. The acting leader was offering more than a tactic in her response to the Welfare Bill. She and those like her simply agree that child tax credits should be limited to two children per household.

You can presume, then, that a Labour government guided by Ms Harman and her sort would not undo the reform. What else in the bill would remain, given abstention, given a desperation to seem responsible in the matter of debt, deficit and spending cuts? What would be done with power?

The received wisdom among the serial losers of Labour's great and good is that the party needs to follow public opinion on “welfare”. Arguments, principles, persuasion: Ms Harman's shell-shocked party cannot afford such luxuries. David Cameron won in May with the votes of just 24.4 per cent of the electorate: where public attitudes towards benefits are concerned, to hear it told, the Tories have shown the way.

You can find evidence to support that view. YouGov polling on Mr Osborne's Budget, for example, confirmed the usual tale: the greatest number of people are fine with benefit cuts because they think benefits go to the undeserving. But – a fairly big but – 32 per cent think cuts have gone too far, 23 per cent think they are about right, and 24 per cent would cut more. There's a degree of ambiguity, in other words.

It deepens. While 45 per cent of those polled say benefits are “too generous”, 40 per cent say they are too low (23 per cent) or about right (17 per cent). At the very least, there is an argument to be had. On these numbers, the assumptions made by Labour's all-knowing pragmatists are unjustified. Ask people what should be cut, as YouGov did, and the claim “benefit cuts are popular” begins to fall apart.

Do state pensioners get too much? Just four per cent think so. The disabled? Only nine per cent agree. Those working for low pay? Support for cuts runs to 12 per cent. How about working people with children, given Ms Harman's support for the Government's two-child diktat? Some 19 per cent believe such households receive too much; 33 per cent think they need more.

Even the unemployed, those spongers of tabloid lore, are not, it transpires, as universally despised as the Tories and Ms Harman wish to believe. Twenty eight per cent say the jobless get too much; 24 per cent too little; and 31 per cent say benefits are “about right”.

Set aside morality. It might be that Labour's acting leader and those like her are simply wrong, that their view of what makes the party electable is horribly misconceived, and that following where Tories lead is plain stupid. Those in the Labour grassroots who have turned Jeremy Corbyn into a plausible leadership candidate might just understand voters better than the great and good.

Unthinkable, they say. Or rather, those who would steer Labour to what they call the centre simply won't think of it. They cannot fathom why their sensible candidate, Liz Kendall (former special adviser to Ms Harman), is doing so poorly. Supporters of Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper meanwhile cannot grasp why two veterans of Labour in government fail to entrance those who have stuck with the party through thick and thin.

It makes no odds, personally, to me. Mr Corbyn might say encouraging things, but an MP who has spent 32 years failing to convince his own colleagues isn't my idea of inspirational. His rivals, though, are sheep being herded by a Tory government. What ought to bother Labour voters is that these candidates are resigned to their fate.