Over-cautious Labour leadership candidates should be listening to Blair

When he gave his speech yesterday, on the 120th anniversary of the Labour party, little of what Tony Blair said about Labour’s predicament was that novel. His diagnosis – that the left has been crippled by old-fashioned views of the government and economy, the perception among voters that it is anti-Western, and an obsession with identity politics – can be found in many a newspaper column.

Equally, when speaking of the “fundamental reconstruction” the left would need to undergo, he was elusively vague. There was talk of a “new progressive coalition”, an embrace of technological change, and a “mentality of government”. Nothing controversial there.

Yet, somehow, the speech seemed peculiarly penetrating and convincing. Of course, his uncanny skill as a communicator was always part of Blair’s genius. Perhaps it might even move the Labour party to listen to him despite his advice not being “particularly welcome to today’s party”, as Blair himself ruefully admitted. Still despite this, and despite the lack of details in his speech, whoever the next Labour leader is could do well to take on his most important lesson – how to fight a political war of positioning.

Currently, the rallying cry of the Keir Starmer, the candidate most likely to become Labour’s next leader, is unity. Having gained the backing of groups on the left and right of the Labour party, he now is bent on assuring that his status as the unity candidate is not compromised by running a campaign that focuses either appeasing the sectarian left – the faction most likely to bolt.

The other leadership candidates seem to share this “don’t rock the boat” vision of unity. Lisa Nandy’s electoral strategy seems to consist of edging into second place and then, hopefully, picking up enough second preference votes from Rebecca Long-Bailey supporters. As such, she has been careful not to say anything that might upset that sectarian wing. Meanwhile, Long-Bailey herself is focused on maintaining the unified support of her base that is obsessed with leftist purity tests.

But as Blair said in his speech, while the natural instinct after a defeat is to call for “unity” the key is in fact to “decide” on a platform and lead. Unity can come afterwards as you rally people around your vision. While the line seemed mainly a shot across the bow of Keir Starmer all the candidates could do well to heed it.

In sharp contrast to the leadership candidates, who barely dare offer even oblique criticism of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and the 2019 Corbynite programme, Angela Rayner has been rather more frank. The front-runner to be deputy leader said Labour has to stop talking about economic revolution if it ever wants to win power. And yet, despite this apparent heresy, she is storming to victory in the deputy-leadership race – with many wishing she had run for the leadership itself.

If the leadership candidates themselves can find the nerve to take on Blair’s advice about leadership in reviving the centre-left and challenging some left-wing pieties then they may well find unexpected allies. Take the concept of a “progressive alliance”. True, many on hard-left like to rail against the Liberal Democrats as vote splitters and “yellow Tories. However, Clive Lewis, who is firmly on the left of Labour was also the only Labour leadership candidate to talk openly of the need to ally with other parties like the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.

Even Rebecca Long-Bailey, who easily saw off Lewis to establish herself as the rallying point for the hard-left, has shown flashes of opinions that don’t meet her supporters’ purity tests. Admittedly, she has almost invariably been pushed to retreat from these by criticism from loud parts of her base. While this means she has failed the leadership test Blair described, she has shown that even apparent champions of the hard-left can entertain thoughts at odds with the programme that the movement that demands absolute conformity to its programme.

Indeed, they might take a leaf out of the Bernie Sanders playbook as the senior democrat fights for the Democrat party nomination in the United States. Sanders is already a figure that Labour radicals admire (and about whom Blair signalled great trepidation). While being a sectarian in many ways, Sanders’ diagnosis of Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 has also focused on the limits of identity politics. This meant that Sanders was willing to tout an endorsement by Joe Rogan, a figure many American liberals regarded with horror owing to his non-PC views. Despite this (or perhaps because of it) he’s now the Democratic front-runner.

The question therefore seems partly one of nerve. If the next Labour leader can establish their right to hold opinions that vocal sections of the membership will dislike, they will almost certainly find quieter sections of the membership that agree with them in unexpected places. Equally, they will establish a right to heterodoxy more generally within the party. At this point, the reconstruction which Blair called for can finally begin.