Just recently, I tweeted:

“It’s vital to learn the lessons of Labour’s General Election defeat. However, the answers will not be found at the door of New Labour’s architects. Blair’s legacy still hangs around this party like a millstone, especially in the North East. I heard it time & time again.”

It got quite a reaction. To be honest, I shouldn’t be surprised by now at the fake outrage and the pure spin that many people put on a simple 280-character take. That’s often what Twitter is — I keep forgetting.

Seriously, though, I get that everything cannot be said in a tweet and that if we are to engage in ideas rather than headlines, we need to explain more than we ever can on Twitter. So, here is a little more about what I experienced in this General Election and in the other 15 years of campaigning for the Labour Party.

When I talked about being out on the doors and the ‘legacy of Blair being an issue’, this means so many different things — so it’s complex: sometimes people mentioned him by name, other times not. Sometimes it was about Blairism or New Labour, rather than anything directly about Tony Blair himself.

Was it the only issue that came up? No, of course not and I would never claim that. As you can imagine there were so many conversations: lots about Boris Johnson, about the fear that people had about a further 5 years of a Tory Government, lots and lots of people talked about Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn came up a lot too.

But specifically, on Blair’s legacy — and note here that I’m talking about his legacy, and not the man, because to talk just about the man is too easy, too lazy — it certainly was a factor and has been for some time. I am only ever interested in the politics and the consequences of the politics. But the ideas around Blair and New Labour had an effect in regions like mine, and we’d be in denial to think that they didn’t. Lived experience is often what people draw on when judging what a Labour Government has done when in power, as well as what they experience of local Labour councils (which are of course severely limited by decreasing national budgets).

I met an ex-steel worker who said that he danced in the street on the day the 1997 Labour Government came to power, he was so overjoyed (I also remember my parents being happy too and waking up with a bit of a ‘party head’ the next morning as well as with some hope, at last). People were desperate for change.

This man went on to explain that he was hopeful also because the Prime Minister’s constituency was just 30 miles away and that things would improve for the North East as a region. But he insisted that, despite all that, he didn’t feel his life or his community had improved over those years. How am I to argue with that man and tell him he is wrong to feel like that? The same man also talked about how he felt Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t the right person to be Prime Minister, that he just didn’t see him as a leader. He believed both things.

I met a woman who also repeated that same sentiment — that things didn’t change for her. That Labour were her great hope and she felt let down. And numerous people have said that to me over the years.

There has to be an acknowledgement of that feeling, balanced by a real assessment of all the things that got better for our communities under New Labour Governments. Often in these discussions people say things like “if you just park Iraq” or if you “just put to one side the illegal war” and I don’t have time for this because what we did internationally also counts in people’s minds, in terms of trusting a party or its leaders.

It is about how prepared our leaders are to send citizens to reckless and crushing wars — and that counts in shaping how people see politicians. We cannot ignore Iraqi, British, American bloodshed because tax credits lifted some people out of poverty. Did people bring up Iraq? Yes. They expressed in lots of different ways the bitterness at the lies that are told by politicians. It symbolised, for many working-class people, the arrogance of the political class, as well as being a humanitarian disaster.

Things have undoubtedly got so much worse under the Tories in the last decade, worse than they ever were under New Labour. But I suppose people are telling us that their lives did not change in a fundamental way, and certainly for the North East. In my region, there is still a profound sense of neglect. This is what I heard, and we can’t reject that being a factor which contributes to the cumulative effect of what a Labour Government would represent in people’s minds.

What we missed, during those years and with that huge mandate in 1997, was an opportunity to change politics — by being radical and brave. Only by doing that could we have fundamentally shifted the power relations that have left communities in the North East behind — to address the imbalance and neglect which has left us with some of the poorest constituencies in the UK.

And there were clear political errors, many of them now acknowledged widely. Much of the outrage is so disingenuous — are we really saying that Private Finance Initiatives — PFI (the hundreds of millions of pounds of debt involved, which is paid to private companies every year, and which could be used productively) aren’t a problem? People know about it and feel angry about it.

Thousands of trade unionists still feel bitter that Blair boasted that we had some of the most restrictive trade union legislation in the Western world. Why did New Labour keep most of Thatcher’s legislation? Because it was a successful mechanism to suppress worker organisation? Because they just didn’t care? Or because they didn’t want to take on the establishment, or it’s media?

It is pure fantasy, no matter how much good you think the Blair years did for your life, to believe that lots of working class people did not see it as a continuation in the way the political class operated — without real concern for their lives, for an lives outside the ‘centre’ of power that they occupied.

We cannot ignore that.

And importantly, under Blair’s administration, there was not the fundamental shift in power to working people and those communities that we’ve talked about since 2015 and which has been a linchpin of Labour’s socialism for decades previous to the 1990s.

Of course, we must assess carefully and with total honesty where we went wrong during the General Election and under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, but no sensible analysis would stop at November 2019, or even September 2015. When we are fighting back, when we are building better this time, we have to be aware of it all, all of our failures — old and new.