There is a comforting myth on the British left that pure Labour—uncontaminated by compromise, focus groups, or the faint smell of capitalism—is the Labour that truly matters. History, that rude archivist, disagrees.
Without New Labour, the Labour Party would by now have the same political status as the Liberal Democrats: permanently moral, eternally irrelevant, and wheeled out every election cycle to explain why this time proportional representation will save them. New Labour did not betray Labour; it rescued it from becoming a well-organised debating society with constituency offices.
Let us start with an inconvenient fact: Labour in its purest ideological form does not win elections. It never has. Apart from the singular achievement of Clement Attlee—operating in the unique political vacuum left by a devastated post-war Britain—Labour governments are not born from purity but from pragmatism.
Michael Foot’s Labour was morally passionate, intellectually rich, and electorally catastrophic. The 1983 manifesto, famously described as “the longest suicide note in history,” was not sabotaged by the media, the CIA, or Rupert Murdoch’s cornflakes. It was rejected by voters who quite reasonably suspected that a government must first win power before it can change the world.
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour followed the same script with better social media. Mass rallies, moral certainty, and a cult of internal righteousness—ending, once again, in defeat. Twice. The problem was not that the voters were stupid or brainwashed. The problem was that elections are not seminars.
Labour is not a theology. It is not a book club. It is not a graduate-level reading group on late-stage capitalism. It is a political party, and political parties exist for one primary purpose: to form governments.
This is where the current bout of internal hysteria enters the stage. Cue the bellyaching of Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Meldedson—permanent residents of the Labour commentariat—now demanding that Keir Starmer resign, not because Labour is losing elections, but because it is in danger of winning them the “wrong” way.
Their feverish campaign is less about principle and more about leverage. Starmer is being used as a wedge issue, a blunt instrument to prise New Labour instincts away from both the party’s leadership and the voters who actually decide elections. The logic is familiar: delegitimise pragmatism, portray competence as betrayal, and insist that anything which appeals to the electorate must, by definition, be morally suspect.
It is a strange form of politics that demands the resignation of a leader for making the party electable. But then again, this is not really about Starmer. It is about settling an old score with New Labour—an attempt to retroactively refight the 1990s, as though history might apologise and reverse the landslides.
The tragedy is that sections of Labour still behave as if losing nobly is superior to winning imperfectly. As if being right in theory somehow feeds children, funds the NHS, or keeps the lights on. It does not. Power does.
The idea that Tony Blair invented pragmatism in 1994 is historically illiterate. Harold Wilson had already grasped the essential truth decades earlier: Labour only wins when it speaks to the country as it is, not as activists wish it to be. New Labour was simply Wilson’s insight updated for a different Britain—a Britain that owned homes, aspired upwards, distrusted nationalisation, and did not wake up every morning dreaming of class struggle.
Blair and Brown understood this, and Labour won three consecutive general elections—an achievement unmatched in the party’s history. That success is precisely what makes New Labour so unforgivable to its internal critics: it worked.
Strip Labour of that instinct again and what remains is a party permanently explaining why defeat is actually a form of victory. At that point, the transformation is complete. Labour ceases to be a party of government and becomes what it most resembles when it indulges this impulse—a very large, very angry Liberal Democrat pressure group.
Labour exists to govern. When it forgets this, the Conservatives do not.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 