IT WAS not only the hammy stage performance by Tony Blair and Keir Starmer this week that summoned up comparisons between now and the run-up to the 1997 general election.

Thursday’s elections did the same, with swings against the Tories reminiscent of the 1993-97 period. That included Uxbridge, despite confounding local factors.

As it was three decades ago, a chunk of voters consolidated of their own accord behind the best placed anti-Tory candidate. Elaborate schemes for tactical voting are redundant.

But in other respects what is striking is the contrast between two periods of fading, lengthy Tory rule.

The Blairite “third way” of the mid-1990s was obviously a strategic shift rightwards and defined itself in opposition to traditional social democracy.

While it was very much about borrowing the technique of the successful Clintonite Democrats, it did also seek intellectual heft and substance as modern, post-ideological politics in a world undergoing profound change.

It emphasised a modernising liberalism in a globalising world that was in a new post-cold war epoch.

Yet it was also strongly demarcated against the “excesses” of the Thatcher-Reaganite centre right in a way that is often forgotten today.

That was evidenced in Labour’s ferocious attacks in Parliament upon John Major’s government. Attacks of substance, not just knockabout. Ideologically, it spoke of the dynamism of the market but also tempering it structurally.

“Stakeholders” were to become wider than just the shareholders, and there was recognition of the need for the state to help lift the bottom 20 per cent out of poverty.

Intellectual ballast was drawn from an eclectic range of thinkers, from Anthony Giddens to Amitai Etzioni.

Belying the impression that it was only about spin, it promised a revolutionary renewal of the country’s instituions. Despite authoritarian law and order proposals, it exuded the language of democracy and the aura of social progress.

The Starmer reprise is threadbare by comparison. Whereas Blair blended effective attacks on the Tory ancien regime with demonstrative breaches with traditional union and Labour policies, Starmer fails to attack the Tories effectively.

He is, however, obsessive in his war against the left and the unions exerting influence in the party. It’s unsurprising. Corbynism advanced further than Bennism, thus it has to be destroyed through a Thermidorean reaction more thorough and swift than in the decade following the miners’ strike.

It is for this reason that the process of starting to challenge Starmer-Labour from a left that is not restricted by party membership is under way. It is stronger than in 1995, when the launch of the Socialist Labour Party of Arthur Scargill suffered from bad timing.

It took three years into the Blair government for a major schism to occur electorally in the shape of Ken Livingstone’s win against the official Labour candidate for mayor in London. An indication of Labour’s faith-breach with voters in that election is that Frank Dobson came third with only 13 per cent.

There is now the possibility of a left independent, Jamie Driscoll in the North East of England, winning a major mayoralty before the general election and a probable Starmer-led government.

That is a difference with 1994-97, though the great desire to get the Tories out does mean, even if by default, a strong Labour vote and in general a hard squeeze on electoral space to its left.

Thursday’s elections showed that. But the Uxbridge result also showed how a significant number of people can use the instrument of a standalone election to send a powerful signal about a particular grievance or feeling of not being listened to.

Previous elections — from Blaenau Gwent to Tower Hamlets — have shown how local opposition to rule by remote party machine can act as a catalyst for an insurgent political campaign.

The unremitting negativity from Starmer-Labour — constantly saying what it will not do to the extent of no ordinary person having a clue what it says it will do — also contrasts with the atmosphere under the ailing John Major. Blair’s concrete pledges were paltry.

But the symbolism and orchestration of radical renewal was huge. It caught a cultural tide that the Tory government was at odds with in the same way its predecessor had been in the early 1960s.

There is no such tectonic shift today. Labour, and too much of the left, is often caught instead in a liberal-conservative culture war as opposed to transcending it with a socialist message.

People joined the Labour Party in significant numbers in the 1990s. The left was cowed but felt part of it. There was to be the end of the 18 Tory years. There was genuine hope.

There seems little of that sentiment now. Thus the process of challenges to Labour have begun. It is on a highly localised basis, it must be emphasised.

There can be little doubt that a Starmer government will make such developments more likely — especially if the Tories suffer a landslide defeat in what will be a “change election,” whatever the intentions and expectation management of the party leaders.

Even less doubt that major social struggles and movements clashing with Rishi Sunak’s government and its successor will provide the most propitious conditions.

That is what happened in Spain, Greece, France, and to a modest extent in Scotland and England 20 years ago. The disappointing outcomes of those left insurgent ruptures should not lead us to dismiss the fundamental processes that were at work and continue today.

That this patchwork process is already happening is significant. I cannot think of a comparison in English post-war politics: that is of a possible left electoral success under a Tory government with Labour heading for office within 18 months.

The justification for abolishing clause four in 1995 was that Labour was going to introduce things like Sure Start, the minimum wage, novel third-way help for parents and so on.

The justification for not abolishing the two-child benefit cap is… the faceless Treasury dogma of “fiscal conservatism.” A Labour source told journalists this week that there is going to be this kind of slap in the face to Labour traditionalism weekly in order to force people to get that Starmer will stick to this discredited orthodoxy.

Rumours are swirling that the latest U-turn from those few commitments carried over from the Corbyn period will be over rights at work and promising to create a single legal category of worker enjoying rights from day one. 

The TUC has set great store by this policy, describing it as a big offer for trade unionists. There will be a hue and cry if it is abandoned. But we know that provoking howls from the unions and left is not an overhead but an aim of Starmer-Labour strategy. 

Blair did this too. Yet it was balanced with some actual plausible promises of changing the whole country in a progressive direction and, while ruthless, the clashes with the left and unions lacked what you can only describe as the spite we see today.

Therein lies the coming rupture of Starmer-Labour with a real Labour sentiment that is much wider than the radical left.

Now is not the time for the radical left to flatten all these developments into “it’s all reformism” or to issue exposure demands and ultimatums.

Now is the time for the left in and out of Labour to be an organic part of these developments. Of course, any Labour member backing Jamie Driscoll or independent left mayor Lutfur Rahman in Tower Hamlets faces expulsion.

That does not mean that any socialist in the Labour Party has to lift a finger in the campaigns against those figures. Nor does any affiliated union have to donate to those efforts. Better to fight the governing Tories and their candidates.

A more united radical left can aim to help bring political clarity and to show why a systematic focus upon developing the movements of struggle is crucial to winning things now and to bettering the prospects of serious left electoral advances that can answer the cynical Starmer calculation that people have nowhere else to go. 

It was the retreat from that orientation that proved a major weakness of “Corbynism” — despite, ironically, Jeremy’s victorious campaign for Labour leader in 2015 coming directly out of the mass movements.

The expression of a left insurgent politics in Britain in the middle of the last decade was unique in Europe in that it took place largely in the most unlikely of places: the Labour Party.

That expression is now dead. It is not coming back, except perhaps in flickers dependent upon political developments outside Labour and outside Parliament.

But if that deep, popular, broadly socialistic sentiment were to coalesce in a credible way outside the Labour Party it would not be a trivial matter.

It would not do then to declare eternal verities, that elections are not the exclusive focus for anti-capitalists and that they always involve pressures of reformist adaptation.

It is true that for anti-capitalists mass, direct struggle trumps electoral activity. But don’t let anyone kid themselves that if left independents win in north-east England, Islington North and possibly a couple of other places before Starmer sets foot in Downing Street that it would be just a minor matter of a reorganisation of parliamentary forces.

You might as well say, as some leftists voice out of understandable bitterness, that the replacement of Sunak by Starmer is just a rearrangement of bourgeois personnel.

It and the election of the likes of Driscoll and Corbyn to the left of Labour would be much more than that — and every serious socialist knows it. At the same time we know that working-class people will vote Labour by the million to get the Tories out even as they don’t have much hope in Labour. 

That is a situation ripe with potential 18 months before an expected general election.