It's no sin to win

The Independent had a nice commentary recently on how Labour needs to accept that its only successful leader of recent years was Tony Blair. Yes, he made mistakes, but for the Labour Party not to also learn from his successes is insane. This in particular rings true :

...it doesn’t matter how disastrous the Conservative leader, how utterly crazy the policies they’re trying to foist on the country, the Conservatives still win elections – unless Tony Blair or Harold Wilson or Clement Attlee is leading the Labour Party.

And it also seems that people tend to forget successes more easily than they do mistakes. A harsh lesson for progressives of all stripes : once you change people's expectations, once they start to take things for granted (as they absolutely should), you can't keep reminding them of how things used to be. People adjust very quickly indeed to what's currently normal; all the effort you expend to secure improvements are quickly forgotten. The question is almost only ever what comes next. People are also quicker to punish mistakes than they are to thank you for achievements.

Hence when it comes to pure political practise, Tony Blair has few equals. If there's anyone you want to listen to about restoring Labour to power, it's Labour's most successful leader. Leave your moral outrage at the door and concentrate on what you actually need to do to win.

EDIT : The Guardian also provides a similar commentary, noting that the tendency to prefer failure to success is peculiar to Labour and not found in the Tories. Moreover, the public do not share this weird perversion. It's good to see that at least some left-wing journalists realise that success does actually matter. Whether this indicates a wider change remains to be seen, but if the Labour Party itself continues to prefer defeat to imperfections, it's doomed to perpetual mediocrity. How thin does progressiveness and moral righteousness look when a party actively denies itself power !


In his recent speech at King's College, Blair outlined a number of important themes :

Labour is in permanent activist mode. Whereas the Tories presume they're going to govern, Labour somewhat subconsciously tends think of itself as a giant campaign group. Worse, it's not a very astute one. There's nothing wrong with wanting to promote one's own moral stance, but Labour tends to view actually persuading Tory voters as being a sort of sin : the Tories are the enemy to be defeated, not people to win over. They wouldn't want those sort of people to vote for them anyway. So instead, Labour only tries to fire up people with a pre-existing liberal/left bias. This is of course largely pointless, since you don't get to record how passionate you are when voting - it's pure numbers that matter.

You have to meet people where they are. Yes, you can seek to convince them of the moral righteousness of your position, but you can't expect miracles. Support for the hard left has only ever been a minority position; refusing to deal with anyone who doesn't agree with you on everything is stupid. Refusing to accept measurable, demonstrable progress because it's not perfect will only mean you achieve no progress. You may not like people's conservative tendencies, but that's just tough on you. You have to formulate policies they can accept, not the extreme ideals which will send them running in the other direction. And you have to debate with people who hold views you don't like. You can disagree with them, but you can't dismiss them : politicians have to accept the legitimacy of the opposition's ideas and their appeal to the public.

Labour needs to be very careful about fighting a culture war. Immigration is the current big issue. If Labour tries to deflect this to something else, like transgender rights, it will lose. As per above, this simply isn't an issue that people are widely concerned with right now, because it affects a miniscule fraction of society. Now, this is not to say that Labour can't advocate for transgender rights, but it cannot make a show of it, or make it the main focus of its strategy. It has to remain a side-issue, because Labour must deal with the existing political reality before it can begin to think about shaping a new one.

Leadership means saying no to your own supporters. He describes the last manifesto as being not merely unconvincing, but actually wrong - a construct of the "leadership" saying yes to every single policy the activists put before them. It's important to listen to pressure groups and trade unions and the like. But the job of the party leadership is to reconcile what its activists want with what the general public as a whole can be persuaded to accept. The leadership should be having the same conversations with its core supporters as with the public at large, not telling different things to different people. Leadership has to be seen to be in charge, not held hostage to every idealist. The Corbyn strategy of negotiating a new Brexit deal and then having a referendum on it was fundamentally flawed.

Party membership is currently a mixed bag. There are many enthusiastic members who are an asset, but currently there are many of the hard left who are not. Leaders who become surrounded by fanboys lose touch with the wider public they have to court. It's not good for a party to be dominated by its most extreme diehards because these people are out of touch by definition.

Assessing support for individual policies is a fallacy. People do not vote on policies separately but in aggregate. In principle they can could like every single policy in a manifesto but still dislike the whole thing, which is what they vote on. Labour has to have a vision for the future, a framework to tie everything together. It has to go back to first principles and formulate a philosophy on which to act. An "incredible" manifesto is not a good idea; people don't like Utopianism.

Labour needs to be radical, not moderate. (The Guardian has a related piece about how the Tories have at least accepted a changing reality whereas the left has not). Yes, removing Jeremy Corbyn and installing someone more sensible would have helped a great deal at the last election, but possibly not at the next one. Society and technology are changing rapidly, and that isn't going to slow down. But, at the same time, being in the centre does not mean a party cannot be radical. Centrist policies can still propose radical changes to address problems; extremists do not have a monopoly on being radical. The Liberal Democrats ? He says for a while it looked like they might become "the real deal", a party of government... but then they reverted to being the Liberal Democrats. A strong centrist party hasn't been on offer for some time.

Labour needs a sweeping overhaul. In its entire existence it's been in power for barely a quarter of the time. It desperately needs to accept reality : it only ever wins as a centre-left party. It cannot continue with schoolyard activism but needs to want to actually govern, with all the associated tough choices that go along with that. The risk to Labour is not so much that it will collapse utterly, but that it will remain perpetually too big to fail but too small to ever win. A new centrist coalition could be an option. There are many forms this could take - it needn't be anything so rigorously formalised as an explicit alliance. Progressive politics is in trouble internationally, but its demise is far from inevitable.