It has become a commonplace of leftwing thought that the New Labour governments were “neoliberal”. The word is thrown around like confetti. But not only has the word itself now become so widely used as to have become almost meaningless, that analysis of Labour’s recent past doesn’t even make sense in its own terms.

A great deal of what Tony Blair did in power was not neoliberal at all, or had neoliberal elements but was aimed in a quite different direction, or was better thought of as social democratic or even socialist. Inexpert and ersatz commentators fill far too much of our airtime and news pages with simplistic nonsense that fails to understand just how complex governing and all governments are, and which has no grasp of scale and scope – only of unconvincing and overheated rhetoric.

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There is no doubt that New Labour’s period in power did contain elements that we could term neoliberal. Its early centralising streak carried on the fake decentralisation of the later Thatcher and Major years, devolving responsibility without power – or much extra money. The private finance initiative financed schools and hospitals that would otherwise never have been built, but also led to some very poor value-for-money deals. With the benefit of hindsight, one of Labour’s greatest failings between 1997 and 2008 was not to have taken greater steps to increase regulation and protect the UK economy given the growing financial services sector. Although the 2008 crisis wrought far worse results in New York than London, the UK was clearly overexposed to a financial crisis anywhere in the developed world.

But a closer look at the other side of the ledger is way overdue. New Labour in power accepted some private access to the functions of the state, particularly on the capital side: but it also rolled the state forward into civic society, via hugely increased employment across the third sector that was dependent on government spending. The creation of a national minimum wage and a tax credits system benefitting the low paid halted the remorseless march of inequality that had so scarred Britain in the 1980s. Some focused interventions, for instance on rough sleeping, returned life-changing results for many. The numbers of people sleeping out on England’s streets on any given night fell from 1,850 in 1998 to 440 in 2010.

School performance improved markedly, especially at the bottom of the attainment distribution – and, in London, at an astonishing rate. NHS inpatient waiting lists fell from 13 weeks to four weeks between March 1997 and March 2009. The public noticed, as perceptions of school performance and NHS performance shot up.

There were plenty of failings, large and small. Most of all, there was a failure of language and imagination. Far too many of the extraordinary social policy gains New Labour made in office were played down, partly because there was a restless desire to avoid complacency and make further progress, and partly because the party’s leaders feared offending the middle-class taxpayers who frightened them so much after the general election defeat of 1992. Blair’s arguments were, at their worst, technocratic, incremental, managerial: they are one of the reasons why Brexiteers and Corbynites have been able, in contradistinction, to paint their conservative and banal ideas as novel, radical and revolutionary.

But all that said, New Labour in power was a party with a powerful analysis of state and society: that globalisation was inevitable, and the British people had to be educated enough, healthy enough and informed enough to stand up to it. Its kaleidoscopic array of responses was therefore Rooseveltian in its “do what works” experimentation. It deserves a rather more sensitive characterisation than just repeating the one word “neoliberalism”.

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That range of policies has allowed the right to say that Blair got Britain into far too much debt, and the left to say that he went too easy on modern capitalism’s concentration of wealth and power. But, in truth, that attack from both directions means that Labour’s attempt to get away from the easy dichotomies of “more” versus “less” was successfully executed while in office, and was more popular than its opponents want to admit.

“Neoliberalism” is a useful boo word, but its use in this context is both crude and unhelpful. No government that rebuilt the public sphere, radically improved the state healthcare system, improved maintained schools and took on homelessness can possibly be painted only in those terms. Labour in its present shape appears to be struggling to convert the extra voters it needs to be sure of victory next time. One reason is that it is engaged in a war against its own history: if it took a more nuanced and more truthful view of Labour’s recent record, it would have a much better chance of success.

• Glen O’Hara is professor of modern and contemporary history at Oxford Brookes University