Tony Blair’s politics are now irrelevant, but he still has something to teach Labour Labour doesn’t win many elections, and a great deal tends to change between them as a result

When Tony Blair last won an election, in 2005, just one in six people had digital television, and the election was primarily fought and won on just three channels: BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. At the last election, the most important political battleground was the BBC’s website and social media pages on Twitter and Facebook, and six people in every 10 had digital television, with many more watching across multiple channels via other means.

If you go back to 1966, the last time a Labour leader other than Tony Blair won a working parliamentary majority, the election was decided in practice on one and a half channels: BBC2 ran for under four hours most nights in the run-up to the election, while BBC1 and ITV shut down at a midnight and didn’t return until the early morning.

This by way of saying two things: the first is that the Labour Party doesn’t win a whole lot of elections, and a great deal tends to change between them as a result.

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The second is that, as Blair himself acknowledges, the political backdrop for Labour’s next leader – let’s call them “Keir Starmer”, because that is almost certainly who it will be – will be completely different to the one Labour faced the last time it won.

It’s not just the media ecosystem that is different. In 1997, when Tony Blair first won power, the economy was growing strongly, as were wages. That allowed Blair and his chancellor, Gordon Brown, to increase public spending simply by refraining from further tax cuts – rising wages and incomes raised government revenues.

The challenge before Starmer – and whoever he names as his shadow chancellor – will be that if they want to reverse the cuts to government spending, let alone extend what Blair and Brown did, they will have to win an argument to not just forgo further cuts in income tax, but to increase it, or they will have to persuade a large group of left-leaning voters to broadly accept David Cameron’s reductions in public spending as permanent.

Our ageing population means that we have a large and growing group of pensioners who are largely insulated from the day-to-day problems of the economy. And politics faces a number of urgent crises – most of all climate change – which have to be prioritised.

So “Blairism” or “New Labourism” or whatever you want to call the ideology or strategy that underpinned Labour’s last stay in government doesn’t have all that much to offer Starmer (or whoever the next leader may be). But to be fair, no one – even its architects – really thinks it does.



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It’s a bit like when fans discuss which Liverpool team would win in a match, Jürgen Klopp’s Premier League champions-elect or Bob Paisley’s all-conquering teams of the 1970s and early 80s? They all know that the answer is that, thanks to advances in diet, health, and how the game is played, Klopp’s team would perform better than Paisley’s. What they are really asking is: is there some universal insight into how to score goals and win football games that means that a team managed by Paisley could win games and league titles in 2020 just as one did from 1974 onwards?

The question is particularly acute in Labour’s case in that today the party celebrates its 120th anniversary. It marks it just as it has marked all but 30 of them: in opposition. Whenever Labour loses successive elections, people start to wonder if the party will ever win again.

In 1959, after Labour’s third successive defeat, a pamphlet asked “Must Labour lose?” The answer, thanks to Harold Wilson, was “No”. In 1994, two years after Labour’s fourth successive defeat, a group of academics and politicians produced a book called Turning Japanese, which speculated about whether the Conservative Party was going to emulate Japan’s Liberal Democrats, who have ruled the country continuously for all but four years since 1955. The Tories instead lost the next three elections in a row.

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But it feels different this time for precisely the same reason that Conservative MPs are uneasy about their presentf government: the last two periods of prolonged Tory government were underpinned by two distinct and shared ideologies – One Nation Conservativism in the 1950s, Thatcherism in the 1980s.

Our present Conservative government has been in power for 10 years, but has produced three radically different prime ministers offering three very different political platforms. In that respect, our politics have become much more like Japan’s than they ever have been before.

So is there something to be learnt from Blair? I think yes. Not in terms of individual policy prescriptions – the political debate is completely different – but as a broad approach. Some of that is complex – it makes sense to look for things that unite your existing voters with the ones you’re targeting, as Blair did with crime, rather than denigrating the people who already support you, as some of Labour’s internal discourse on voters in cities does – but some of it is simple, like arranging your big speech on the future of Labour on a quiet wet Thursday when there isn’t much else to talk about.

Stephen Bush is the political editor at the ‘New Statesman’ magazine

This article was amended on 24 February to clarify that 1966 was the last time prior to 1997 that the Labour party had a working parliamentary majority. The party won a majority of three in 1974.