In recent times, various claims have been put forward in defence of the New Labour project. However, the latest by Phil Wilson MP is so fantastical that only a true believer could have the audacity to make such remarks with a straight face. Wilson’s claim is that New Labour was somehow the product of and informed by, working-class demands. According to an account of a recent seminar in The Independent, Wilson told the audience that New Labour was “rooted in making a difference for the working-class communities of the former coalfields of the North-East.”

In reality, the exact opposite was true. New Labour consciously and deliberately shunned working-class communities. One of its fundamental articles of faith was that working-class voters did not matter because as Peter Mandelson put it, they had ‘nowhere else to go’. Instead, it was ‘middle England’ that had to be courted. As for the organised working class – the trade union movement – Blair boasted of having ‘the most restrictive labour laws in the Western world’ and became the first Labour leader to refuse to address the Durham Miners’ Gala – Britain’s most important and historic working-class festival. The New Labour machine repeatedly parachuted in middle-class MPs into working-class constituencies. Think Blair in Sedgefield, David Miliband in South Shields, Peter Mandelson in Hartlepool, Tristram Hunt in Stoke or Douglas Alexander in Renfrewshire. Unsurprisingly, New Labour’s tenure in office saw working-class support collapse, something which Ed Miliband proved incapable of addressing during his time as Labour leader.

Wilson’s prescription for Labour’s dismal election result of 2015 was to revert to Blairism – a view shared by only 4.5% of the party membership. Since Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, Wilson has relentlessly been on the attack, showing total disdain for the views of the membership in the process. He was an active player in the ‘coup’, accusing Corbyn of ‘sabotage’ and demanded his immediate resignation after the EU referendum result, as well as backing the ‘no confidence’ motion in the PLP. Still unable to come to terms with the democratic verdict of the party membership, during last year’s general election, he issued an incredibly reckless and self-indulgent leaflet which stated, “I put local people first. If this means standing up to May, I do. If this means opposing Corbyn, I do.” Such was its design and content that, at first glance, you would be forgiven for thinking it was not the literature of a Labour candidate. For good measure, he then told the press: “People don’t like Corbyn; I don’t like Corbyn”.

Despite being proven decisively wrong by the general election result, Wilson has not relented. Immediately after the election, he criticised Labour’s immensely popular policy platform, branding our tuition fees policy as “middle class”. Quite how New Labour’s abolition of universal education through the introduction and subsequent trebling of tuition fees helped working-class students is never explained. In fact, evidence points the other way. As Professor Claire Callender recently concluded: ‘Working-class young people are far more likely than students from other social classes to avoid applying to university because of debt fears.’

Last year’s general election result vindicated the much-derided supporters of Corbyn. Despite all the warnings of impending doom and despite the unhelpful antics of the mischief-makers within our own ranks, Labour’s vote increased, including amongst working-class voters.

Wilson has made much of an apparent working-class ‘swing’ towards the Tories, yet the story was not one of working-class Labour voters abandoning Corbyn’s Labour for May’s Tories. It was simply inevitable that with the collapse of UKIP, the working-class Tory vote would increase. The idea that UKIP posed the greater threat to Labour was, to a large extent, a media-driven exaggeration. Its Thatcherite, anti-Europe agenda always appealed most to Tory working-class (as well as middle-class) voters, which in many cases rendered Labour the beneficiary of a split right-wing vote. Last summer, the majority of these voters simply returned to the Tory fold.

At long last, after years of neglect and complacency, the long process of winning back the trust of working-class communities is underway. As the election showed, we are reconnecting with people in our traditional heartlands such as Wales and Scotland. And here in the North East, Labour’s vote went up in every single constituency, including those in the former coalfields. Even in Bishop Auckland, which Wilson points to in support of his thesis, Labour’s vote saw a substantial increase compared with 2015 and 2010. The notion that vote increases in Blaydon, Blyth, Wansbeck and Easington can be attributed to “students and middle class voters” should be treated with the derision it deserves. We are re-connecting in other important ways too. Labour’s association with the trade union movement is now a source of pride and our leadership backs workers in industrial disputes.

As all Wilson appears capable of offering in support of his claims are anecdotes, I have one of my own. When canvassing in Bishop Auckland during the general election, I spoke to a man who had never voted before but was voting Labour because of our commitment to a £10 an hour minimum wage.

If you want to see where unchecked Blairism leads to, look at Labour’s electoral disaster in Scotland in 2015, where New Labour devotees such as Jim Murphy, Douglas Alexander and John McTernan led the charge into oblivion. Or look around at the recent dismal electoral performances of the SPD and many of our other European sister parties which have failed to break decisively with the so-called “Third Way”.

The saving grace is of course that thanks to a democratic revolution in the Labour Party, the leading lights in the New Labour clique no longer hold sway. Instead, they now appear reduced merely to unconvincing attempts to rehabilitate their own record and indulging in increasingly incoherent and self-serving criticisms of Labour’s modern mainstream.