Yahoo News Evening Standard comment: Labour should heed Blair’s birthday warning | A radical new £20 note
Happy birthday, Labour. Or perhaps not so happy. For the Labour Party was born 120 years ago today with an explicit purpose: to form governments that advanced the interests of working people.
Its founding leaders, like Keir Hardie, weren’t interested in it being a protest movement, or fomenting a revolution that never happens. They wanted to get a majority of Labour MPs elected to the House of Commons, put their leader in Number 10 and enact change.
But at the risk of spoiling the birthday celebrations, here’s a hard truth: for much of its lifetime, Labour has largely failed in the task it set itself. For the party has held office for only a quarter of its entire existence.
That may not be obvious to a generation brought up watching Tony Blair win elections. But nights spent dancing away to the tune of Things Can Only Get Better were the exceptions, not the rule.
The story of modern British politics has been one of long periods of Conservative administrations punctuated by occasional Labour regimes.
Indeed, Tony Blair is the only person born in the past hundred years who has won an election for Labour. As he reminds his party this morning in a speech, that doesn’t look like changing any time soon. The Labour Party has lost the past four elections — and is odds-on to lose a fifth next time around.
The reasons are set out with brutal clarity by their only living election winner. Their economic policies hark back to a bygone era of nationalisation and state control, and are irrelevant to working people today.
On foreign policy, the party that in office gave us Nato and the nuclear deterrent now wallows in anti-Western conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile it is losing a cultural war with the nationalist Right by disappearing down the rabbit holes of “identity” politics, loudly denouncing anyone who takes issue with their outrage while the general public looks on unimpressed.
Mr Blair calls for a “fundamental reconstruction” of the party if it is to have any chance of reversing its failure.
It’s not enough, he rightly says, to just be a bit more moderate — only nationalise the railways and Royal Mail, rather than the water and energy companies too. The Left needs to rethink entirely how to tackle social injustice and redistribute power in our digital age.
None of the current contenders for the Labour leadership show any sign of understanding this. Perhaps that is to be expected from the likes of Rebecca Long-Bailey, whose big idea is to bring the man who led her party to the worst defeat since the Thirties into her shadow Cabinet.
Lisa Nandy has impressed in some interviews, and may be a force in the future, but has said nothing of real note to breakthrough.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment so far has been the frontrunner, Sir Keir Starmer. He has that precious quality most opposition leaders lack — he passes the blink test as someone who could be our premier.
But, take a longer look and the question looms — does he really understand why Labour keeps losing?
For his prescriptions seem exactly what Mr Blair is warning us against: a slightly more moderate and presentable version of Jeremy Corbyn.
The hope is that the former public prosecutor is waiting until after he is elected leader to pivot. But that feels at best like wishful thinking; and at worst like a huge mistake.
For Sir Keir — the man named after his party’s founder — needs a mandate for far-reaching change if he is to have any chance of being the second person born in the last century to lead Labour into office.
A radical new £20 note
The new £20 note that enters circulation today and features the artist JMW Turner and his painting The Fighting Temeraire, might seem solely a celebration of tradition.
But it is worth remembering Turner was a radical in his day, whose other works included Slave Ship — an 1840 painting created to expose the exploitation and horror of slavery.
It means the new note is one that everyone should be happy to hold in their hand.
