The party can’t win by reprising Tony Blair’s strategy – because the political and economic conditions of the 1990s are not coming back
For Labour, the future simply isn’t what it used to be. Last week’s election results have left the party even further from power than it was at the December 2019 general election. There is little indication that its leadership can identify a way forward. Worse still, the reaction to its first electoral defeat has been to reach for the familiar nostrums of the New Labour years. Peter Mandelson has been brought in to advise Keir Starmer’s inner circle, and all indications are that a reprise of the third-way strategy is being touted to fill the current strategic vacuum.
In moments of defeat, there is a tendency to look back at what has worked in the past and assume it could be repeated again in the future. The third-way approach of New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was a political and economic strategy that brought remarkable electoral success over 20 years ago. It rested on a strategy of “triangulation” – the deliberate distancing of centre-left parties from their leftwing base and politics, and the creation of a new centrist synthesis of left and right that sought to transcend both categories. But far from representing the immutable truths of some enduring strategic playbook, the third way was peculiar to a particular moment in history, and it is fundamentally ill-suited to the world of the 2020s.
