Labour needs to leave Tony Blair behind – he would never get elected now Times have changed, and so must Labour

After its fourth consecutive defeat, Labour needs some soul searching, honest debate and reflection. Sadly these are too often squeezed out by tribal loyalty to past leaders or factional in-fighting.

Last week Labour peer Andrew Adonis said that “Labour will only become electable again when it comes to love Tony Blair”.

There is indeed a strong case for Tony Blair, the man who won Labour three consecutive elections, helping to keep Labour in power for the longest period in its history. Among his lesser achievements, he even convinced me to join the Labour Party in 1996.

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No other Labour leader has come to power with such a bountiful inheritance. When former leader John Smith tragically died in 1994 Labour was an astonishing 21 points ahead of a Tory party tearing itself apart. That would later translate into a 12-point and 179-seat majority in the 1997 election. Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn and whoever succeeds him will all have been elected with Labour trailing in the polls after bad defeats.

Blair’s admirers cite successes such as the minimum wage, Good Friday Agreement, Human Rights Act, Sure Start, extra investment in the NHS and schools, and devolution in Scotland, Wales and London. There is no doubt that millions of people benefited from the Labour government of 1997 to 2010 – the investment in public services, the reduction of child and pensioner poverty.

Few on the left would argue against any of those policies, though they do however have one thing in common: they are all policies of the first term, or at least that began in the first term.

The reason Blair is unloved by so many Labour members is that they feel he squandered his inheritance. Despite a huge majority and mandate, he ditched Labour’s commitments in opposition to renationalise the railways, repeal anti-union laws and to restore the earnings link with pensions.

Even the welcome increase in public investment was toxified by its means of delivery. The Public Finance Initiative has saddled public services with rip-off debts that would make Wonga blush. City academies and foundation hospitals provided a model of marketisation that future Tory governments extended, while punitive policies on welfare and immigration would pave the way for the hostile environments consolidated under the Tories.

But most of all, Blair is rightly condemned for cosying up to the most reactionary US Presidency (at that time) in the war on terror and the Iraq war – which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and nearly 200 British troops sent to their deaths on a dodgy dossier.

If Blair had a lucky inheritance, he was equally fortunate in his exit, leaving the stage in June 2007 less than three months before the run on Northern Rock and the global financial crash would finish off the already declining force of New Labour.

The continuation of deregulation in the finance sector was yet another example that, as Tony Blair himself said, he saw his role “was to build on some Thatcher policies”, and Blair’s chancellor Alistair Darling went into the 2010 election promising “cuts deeper than Thatcher”, even though child poverty had started to rise.

Labour under Blair lost five million votes between 1997 and 2010 – and nearly two-thirds of Labour party membership. Both the public and the Labour membership had fallen out of love with Tony Blair by the time he departed.

So no, Tony Blair is not the model for the next Labour leader to follow. A YouGov poll suggest voters consider him no more favourably than Jeremy Corbyn. Healthy debate requires an honest assessment of the past in order to learn from it – valuing what was good and critiquing what was bad.

Labour has to look forward at the big challenges facing our country. An economy that is sluggish and unbalanced. It requires an active state pursuing regional industrial policies that deliver the skills, jobs and investment for a green new deal, and public ownership so that people and planet are put before profit. It must make the case for redistributive taxation, including of wealth, to fund the needs of an ageing society. Times have changed, and so must Labour.

While Blair cannot be held responsible for those who act in his name, those who claim to be his acolytes have spent too much of their time undermining his successors – Brown, Miliband and Corbyn. This has left them either isolated within the party or walking away in a huff (some even accepting peerages from a Conservative Prime Minister).

Today, Blairism appears devoid of new policy ideas, bitter and harking back to a now distant past it views through rose-tinted spectacles. The once thoroughly modern Tony Blair would surely have disapproved.

Andrew Fisher was Executive Director of Policy at The Labour Party from 2016 to 2019. He is the author of The Failed Experiment – a book about UK economic policy and the financial crash of 2007/08.