2017 and all that

Labour are rightly looking at previous victories for guidance on how to win. They shouldn't forget what happened when Labour got closer than expected under Corbyn too.

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Labour’s HQ are reportedly consulting with a number of New Labour figures on how they won the 1997 landslide. This makes sense. There will be a number of lessons from the past on how to succeed in the present. But it can’t be a facsimile of that campaign. We are in a very different place now.

The metric I always use to demonstrate how different a world we live in then and now is that Tony Blair had never sent an email or text - never mind a tweet or WhatsApp when elected. 24 hour news was in its infancy and social media was over a decade away.

So while there are absolutely lessons to belearned from history, there is not an off-the-shelf campaign strategy to be lifted and repeated.

So having said that, what lessons can and should Labour take from more recent elections? Obviously the main ones are largely negative. Labour went backwards in 2019, 2015 and 2010. But they did do a lot better than expected in 2017. That is worthy of thought - but because of what came afterwards and the overclaiming by some saying Labour had won when they hadn’t and the denial of recognition any progress of others - this largely hasn’t happened. Which means that what can and should be learned from this most recent example of an election where Labour did better than expected has been widely ignored.

I am not, predominantly interested here on Labour’s policy prospectus. That will, of course, be the predominant part of any discussion - and rightly so. But I think there are things to be learned from election campaigns outside of the policy details.

For what it’s worth though, I subscribe to the point of view (brilliantly expressed by Martin Kettle here) that Starmer’s policy prospectus will be significantly to the left of New Labour’s. But what won’t be is the framing of it.

I find this interesting because I have often critiqued New Labour for not making enough of a case in favour of a more overtly left wing policy prospectus. But where I think I agree with this strategy is in the timing. Getting elected and governing successfully, getting reelected and embedding change are different things and the sequencing is important.