The only way to build on previous achievements is to defend them, write Richard Angell and Conor Pope. This is the conclusion of the Record pamphlet, to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1997 election

If we do not defend the last Labour government, why would anyone vote for the next one? There is another answer to that. It is that the last Labour government will have been so long ago, and be so irrelevant to modern political discourse, that no one will care what good or bad Labour did back then.

That is a much sadder outcome. The gains New Labour made in power should not be forgotten. It is a period from which we should take immense pride, and which should influence our thinking about how we make the next gains, in the next Labour government.

In Tony Blair’s famous ‘new dawn’ speech as the sun came up on 2 May 1997, he asked the crowd: ‘It has been a long journey for this party, has it not?’

It had been. Eighteen long years the party spent in opposition. After Ramsay MacDonald’s defection in 1931, Labour spent 14 years out of power. When Clement Attlee lost in 1951, it would be a further 13 years without a Labour prime minister. The comparatively brief four year hiatus in Harold Wilson’s government is an anomaly for a party that more often settles into the comfort of opposition following an election loss.

Too often, Labour reaches for the wrong conclusion from being beaten. In the final years of the 1997 to 2010 government we were told that the country was turning against us because they hated identity cards and public service reform. Ed Miliband bet the house on this being true, and won the leadership – only to find that Britain went even more Conservative.

It is that, more than anything, that leaves Labour so far from power. The party still does not understand why the public no longer wanted us in office and its efforts under successive leaders to distance us from our own feats has only served to diminish those accomplishments in the eyes of the voters.

Our task from the progressive centre is not to be a tribute act to whatever the last Labour government is, but to determinedly give an assessment of where that Labour government went right and wrong that chimes with the public – not the naysayers within the party – and correct the mistakes. We do not seek to relive past achievements but build on them.

Yet to build on them we must ensure their foundations are solid. That means defending our record, not chipping away at it. If it looks decrepit now, it is because Labour has been complicit in neglecting its own history.

It is common for people now to wonder how Labour can even be the same party that was in government less than a decade ago. In short, it is because we refused to recognise an inevitable forthcoming defeat and then chose to believe our own reasons for leaving government in 2010 rather than the ones given by the ones who turfed us out. Five years later, we did the same again, on a bigger scale.

We cannot allow Labour to be divided by how people view our last stint in power. It is backwards-looking and absurd. The obvious solution is that we all embrace what a success those 13 years were: that is the best way to move on. We should now be far enough removed from it for it to no longer be about personalities. When we audit it now, we should be able to do so on the strength of arguments alone. On that basis, the only argument with any strength to it is that New Labour changed the country, and for the better.

We went into government in 1997 with a real sense of what Britain should be: ‘A Britain that stands tall in the world, whose sense of its future is as certain and confident as its sense of its own history.’ The country is in dire need of a Labour party that is willing to set out a direction as clear as that now, but it is not likely to get one soon. Like the country, Labour cannot have a sense of where it is going until it has a settled sense of its own past.

To be modernising, forward-looking and, yes, new, Labour must start rejecting the analysis that says it wasted its time in office. Instead, we should say that Labour government was good, and the next one will be better. This is our record, let us build on it.

–––––––

Richard Angell is director of Progress and Conor Pope is deputy editor of Progress. You can read the whole Record pamphlet here.