‘Blair had a strategy: can Labour find one now?’

The Labour Party is very good at losing General Elections. It has only ever ‘won’ eleven of them, if by ‘winning’ we mean taking or holding onto power. Labour has secured a stable majority on even fewer occasions: six times in its whole history.

The first time it won, in 1923, it wasn’t even the largest party, and held office because the Liberals tolerated it. Labour has only marched out of Opposition and straight into full majority government during peacetime in 1964, 1997 and 2024. Those last two victories were the only times the majority was anything more than wafer-thin.

So when Labour does win, it has to make a difference, not get swept away by its opponents, internal divisions or circumstances (as it was in the inter-war era) or by voters’ weariness of change and economic crisis (as in 1951 and 1979).

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Those differences are real. Clement Attlee built the welfare state and established the National Health Service in the years immediately after the Second World War. Harold Wilson had a fair claim to make Britain a fairer, more tolerant, more modern place: the Equal Pay Act, more rights in the workplace, massive increases in education spending and the Race Relations Acts were all testament to that.

In each case though, the attempt at reaching a stable settlement failed to stick. The Conservatives came back even though they’d been written off and took advantage of Labour’s hard work – its achievements, its plans, its sacrifices while in office.

The Tories were able to spend all the money that fell into their laps during the popular affluence of the 1950s, so much of the groundwork for which had been laid by Labour’s rescue of the post-war economy. In the 1980s, they were able to spend the bonanza of North Sea Oil that Labour had hoped would save their social democratic dreams.

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When Tony Blair came to power in 1997, he seemed to carry all before him. Previous Labour leaders had inherited overspending and a troubled economy. John Major and Kenneth Clarke bequeathed him an economy that was expanding and a state that had a lot of room to grow. But like most Labour leaders before him, he knew that the party’s time in office would be limited without building a new settlement – a new contract between the state and the individual, as he might have put it. We put too much store by the strong economy Blair and Gordon Brown inherited, and not enough in their stewardship and use of it.

That’s not the least of the ways in which, looking back, Blair resembles so-called ‘Old’ Labour more than his own rhetoric, and the disaster of the Iraq War, made it seem at the time. Research for my new book on his governments shows that he was focused throughout on making Britons feel and act differently, improving everyday life in countless small ways and in securing his legacy.

Here there were a number of Labourist holdovers that he either wanted or felt forced to achieve: a national minimum wage; compulsory trade union recognition; a properly funded NHS; a broad-based attack on child poverty; paternity leave; Civil Partnerships. All of these were recognisable in both the Attlee and Wilson traditions – the instinctive actions of a reformist, gradualist and social democratic party.

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There were new elements, both when it comes to strategy and tactics. The basic idea was this: economic and to a certain extent social globalisation was coming, and so the UK had to prepare for it. Education, training, public service and infrastructure policies were all run, at least in theory, to that end.

Underneath that basic endpoint, which looks dated in the post-globalising world we inhabit but then seemed fresh and exciting, some clear methods were critical. The state should be interconnected, ‘networked’ in the jargon, both across the public sector and with charities, the third sector and civic society.

Local people should be continuously involved in that work, rather than the local councils New Labour instinctively (and unwisely) distrusted. Public services should be adaptable, responsible, flexible – and therefore maintain public support in a new consumer era.

Some of that now seems like a string of clichés from a different time. New Labour’s faith in quasi-markets which treated the public like ‘customers’ now seems inflexible in its turn. Involving citizens in ‘delivery’ is hard when they might have busy, crowded lives. ‘Networking’ needs money, not just rhetoric.

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Still, at least New Labour had a blueprint of sorts. Can we really say that now, in the wake of Labour’s five missions, six ‘first steps’, two priorities and six milestones? That may be Blair’s best lesson for Keir Starmer.  Know where you want to go; establish clear priorities; stick to your plans; be confident about your own principles. This government looks uncomfortable in its own skin, in a way Blair never did. 

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