Why is Keir Starmer still paying lip-service to the politics that steered Labour into an electoral chasm?

It’s worrying that the shadow Brexit secretary is paying lip-service to the failed politics of the last four years

Almost 13 years ago, two former New Labour ministers summoned journalists to the launch of a new website, which they said was intended to widen out the debate within their party as the contest to succeed Tony Blair took shape. It was called “The 2020 Vision”.

Well, here we are in 2020, and the vision of the country which confronts us is certainly not what Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn would have hoped. We have a Conservative Party with a landslide majority, a Labour Party not just on its knees but threatening to continue to hit itself in the face, and a Liberal Democrat Party reeling from the consequences of its poor choices. We’re living in the future, but for many progressives – confronted with perhaps a decade of Tory rule and departing Europe – this comes close to dystopia.

Regardless, in the inverse of the 1997 Labour anthem, things could, in fact, get worse.

This week, Labour MPs and MEPs have decided which of their number is going forward to a vote of the full party membership for the positions of leader and deputy leader. Despite Rebecca Long-Bailey’s faltering start and utterly vapid articles setting out her vision (or lack thereof) for the party, and the fact that we were almost treated to a hilarious Long-Bailey vs Barry Gardiner vs Ian Lavery showdown, the hard left has still managed to organise itself to the point where it has succeeded in putting Richard Burgon on the ballot paper.

That some in the PLP have deemed it acceptable to nominate this titan of modern politics only confirms to me that the “moron” tendency in the PLP (copyright Margaret Beckett, 2015) is alive and well.

Although Long-Bailey’s disarray and Burgon’s obvious inadequacy should raise hopes that they can be defeated, if Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Jon Lansman and Unite all row in behind them, then they could succeed – and we may be forced to finally confront the possibility that the Labour Party may be finished.

Things look bleak and, frankly, for those of us who previously left Labour – to try and set up something new, or simply because we couldn’t be part of a party which had so completely and utterly gone off the rails, from policy to ingrained racism – it can be hard to find optimism. Our country faces enormous challenges in the coming decade, but the Left seems terminally divided and the way out of the dark is not obvious.

For some, of course, the remedy is clear – they call for us to rejoin our old party en masse, arguing that it was always wrong to try and create something new and that Labour was only ever the most realistic game in town. (If the voter flight from Labour in region after region, in demographic after demographic, is not a corrective to this attitude then I don’t know what is. There is no god-given right for Labour to exist.) The bugle has been sounded for us to sign back up in order to support a “viable” centrist candidate – and according to the buglers, that person is Keir Starmer.

Sir Keir has an unenviable task. Before you can win your country, you have to win your party. In this leadership contest, that means charting an admittedly difficult course and dealing with some elements who not only still support Corbyn, but who give him “10 out of 10” for his leadership. The worrying thing for me is that Starmer seems incredibly willing to pay lip-service to the politics of the last four years, which have steered Labour into an electoral chasm. “Our party moved to a more radical position in the last few years – and we were right to do it,” he declared at a local Q and A after the election. Well, the electorate disagreed. “We are now the party of anti-austerity and rightly so. We’re not going back,” he added – forgetting that Ed Miliband and Ed Balls were, indeed, anti-austerity politicians and giving succour to the leftist narrative that before Corbyn came along, Labour was in hock to Tory economics. And so it goes on – including refusing to retreat from being “the party of common ownership”, despite the country rejecting nationalisation out of hand barely a month ago.

Of course I understand that change is a process, and that the Labour Party isn’t going to do a 180-degree turn from Corbynism to a more moderate centre-left position overnight. But refusing to confront the reality of the result of 12 December will get Labour nowhere; and allowing that defeat to be framed simply around one man also fails the test. There has been far too much nonsense talked from Labour’s soft Left about how the 2017 manifesto in particular was some sort of holy text; of how the policy was great, but the message carrier was the problem. If Labour wants to win again, to once again become a serious party of government, then it all has to go – the leader, the advisers, the policies. They were not fit for 2017 or 2019, and they are certainly not fit for the 2020s.

There is no time to waste. This is not a leadership contest that can afford to duck a real and serious examination of why Labour lost. Britain’s schools are suffering not just from a lack of money but from the absence of a curriculum which prepares children and young people for the challenges of the century. Our hospitals are tottering; without reform, all the Conservatives will be doing is throwing good money after bad. The police desperately need personnel and powers. An epidemic of homelessness means people are dying on the streets. There is an urgent debate to be had about a post-Brexit Britain’s role in the world. And lest we forget, large parts of the planet are currently on fire.

If Labour is to be a meaningful part of any of the conversations about solutions to these problems, the candidates for leading it need to meaningfully engage in debate with party members about why Labour has moved further and further away from power over the last 10 years. The ones which do would get my vote (and the only ones who have shown any inclination to do so thus far, are Jess Phillips and Ian Murray). If that debate is bypassed, then the only “2030 Vision” which progressives have to look forward to is one where a Conservative prime minister has just scored a sixth successive term in office.

Rob Newman is a former Labour political adviser and senior staff member of the Independent Group for Change.