THE battle for Labour’s political identity is shaping up as a contest between malign myth and rational enquiry; between the dead weight of a dying tradition and the adult stirrings of a new sense of collective values; between the zombie politics of capitalist consensus and a new politics of class combativity.

It is taken as the common ground of Labour politics that New Labour’s corpse is dead and buried.

That, while a balanced accounting of the New Labour years will allow for the positive effects of some policies — particularly around early-years provision and NHS spending — the two key features of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s political project are history. 

The great capitalist crash crisis of 2008 finished off the notion that a mildly progressive policy of social spending based on taxing the operations of a hyperactive financialised economy is a rational basis for government.

Likewise the flip side of Britain’s integration into the global capitalist economy was its participation, even leadership, in a succession of imperial wars that thoroughly disgusted both younger and older generations and rendered the politicians who promoted and justified these atrocities as pariahs.

There are other features of these years that are best passed over in embarrassed silence. The private-finance initiative programmes which were initiated by John Major’s Tory government were enthusiastically taken up by New Labour, keen to shift the accounting for infrastructure spending off the government’s books, the better to meet the public-expenditure limits imposed by by the Maastricht treaty. 

There is barely a trade-union leader or Labour politician of these years who will admit to supporting this policy but at the time it was hailed as a smart move and fiercely defended by ministers and TUC figures alike.

How then are we to understand Blair’s return into Labour’s debates?

Once again projected into the public space we see perfidy and perdition inscribed on his face. Most astonishing is the discovery that he is still a Labour Party member.

When a hapless innocent can be expelled from the party for retweeting a social media posting from a dubious source, it is astounding that a warlord who should be in The Hague facing war-crime charges — and who is feted wherever his recently acquired multimillion fortune finds admirers — still holds a party card.

Blair’s self-serving hypocrisy has a transparent purpose. This intervention into Labour’s post mortem — by a man whose policies saw five million Labour votes drain away — claims that people saw Corbyn as “fundamentally opposing what Britain and Western countries stand for.” 

The irony here is that it was precisely his fundamental opposition to Blair’s wars and Western neoliberal economic orthodoxy alike that originally made Corbyn Labour’s leader.

Blair described Corbyn’s ideology as “quasi-revolutionary socialism,” which will “never appeal to traditional Labour voters.”

It was these policies that delivered the greatest increase in votes in 2017, and in 2019, even in defeat, saw Labour’s total vote rival and even exceed Blair’s in victory.

Blair’s purpose is to add extra bile to the the case that Labour’s election defeat was the product of its radical manifesto and the unpopularity of Corbyn and, in doing so, deflect attention and analysis away from the three-year process which saw Labour’s principled commitment to honour the referendum vote transformed, by attrition and compromise, into de facto support for its opposite.

These arguments are widely rehearsed in the movement and in the columns of the Morning Star and need not be laboured here. The important thing is that Blair’s intervention is to buttress a parallel process in which various contenders for the Labour leadership offer their workings, perhaps less provocatively worded than the war criminal’s, of the same theme.

The Labour succession battle is being fought out not as the open contest of openly contrasting ideologies but as carefully coded reworking of the past three years. 

Those who wish to reverse the direction of Labour’s evolution as a partisan party of working-class values — and policies which appeal across the board to the entirety of Britain’s working people — dare not say so openly.

Even Rupert Murdoch’s dog in this fight has leavened her offering. Jess Phillips, for one, may find out that electorates are the vehicles of collective memory and that Labour’s membership — the electorate for Labour’s leadership — is in possession of an extremely fine-tuned collective memory.

Johnson’s team won this election by stealing some of Labour’s clothes and by focusing with relentless discipline on Labour’s Brexit-shaped vulnerability.

One of the paradoxes of the election campaign was the way in which the conflict between the contending factions in the Tory Party’s long-running Brexit feud faded away.

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s enforced internal exile was not only because his posturing disrupted the Tory pitch to proletarian voters but because his strong identification with the European Research Group of supposed “irreconcilables” might remind people of the patrician pretences that predated the Tory presentation of itself as united.

Similarly, the small band of Remainer intransigents had to be purged, but the real story was the way in which both the ERG and the much more agnostic and silently EU-tolerant tendencies in the parliamentary party were so easily accommodated.

The contrast is with Labour’s endless conciliation to its own entirely irreconcilable Remain right. One of Johnson’s subliminal messages (apart from endless posing in manual-work wear) was his presentation as a man of steely resolve. 

This, from the man who was equally comfortable with either of his worked-out position papers for and against Brexit, is a testament to the value of branding in modern politics.

In talking to the Tories at our election night count — in a rock-solid Tory seat — I was struck by the way in which Brexit barely stirred a flicker of emotion among them. 

In a constituency party which, earlier this year, two Tories of my acquaintance described as entirely elderly and irremediably Brexit-minded, it is interesting how the party had mobilised a layer of younger people and how utterly unengaged they appeared with the controversies which have convulsed their party over recent years.

In solidly Brexit Kent where only the most affluent town, Royal Tunbridge Wells, returned a Remain majority, the social divisions between country and town are as deep as the divisions between the comfortably off and the masses of working people in depressed coastal towns, former mining villages and the largely de-industrialised Medway towns.

Labour appeared dominant in the main town of our constituency. It easily won the poster war. Barely a Tory, Lib Dem or Green was seen on the streets. 

Only Labour managed a comprehensive door-to-door canvassing operation, but then only in the town. But as the votes piled up it was clear that the villages remained overwhelmingly Tory. 

The rural districts where the agricultural labourers of yesterday are long gone — and where the well-heeled middle class and the richer retired exercise decisive social weight — a near impregnable Tory majority was delivered for a Tory minister of such flexible convictions that she has contrived to appear, in a seamless display of devotion to office, on every side of each debate.

Not only did the Tory machine deliver the vote but it appears that the party organisation is reconstituted as an effective machine.

At constituency level the Tories were confident of winning the seat but several admitted to anxieties over how the central strategy would play out nationally and in the Midlands and the north of England.

Their anxieties were not justified. The strategy worked. The Tory party reinvented itself as the party of power and the parliamentary Tory party is, for the moment, Johnson’s creature.

Precisely how this alchemy works necessarily remains a mystery to those outside the magic circle, or those who do not inhabit this world of privilege.

It does, however, demonstrate the critical importance of leadership. Johnson was the man for this job precisely because he was conspicuously available to occupy any of the positions which animated the argument in the Tory party and was able to convince the decisive sections of our ruling class that his leadership could dissipate the impetus behind the Corbyn phenomenon.

The referendum result followed by the 2017 election gave not just the Tory party a profound shock but it unsettled the main constituents of the dominant bloc within the ruling class with which it is intertwined.

From the moment David Cameron’s strategy collapsed and, later, when Labour made up that 20-point deficit and came near to constituting a government, the main instruments of state, political and ideological coercion were devoted to a twin project: firstly of reconstituting the Tory party as a reliable instrument of class power, and secondly disaggregating Labour as such.

Their success in this impeccably Gramscian exercise in hegemonic politics bears intense scrutiny by the left.

Firstly, the Tories recognised the potency of the Brexit vote as the issue on which they could clothe their wider project in a cloak of democratic legitimacy. This necessitated marginalising the internal Tory band of unrepentant Remainers. Job done.

It necessitated assigning to the Lib Dems the role of repository for a portion of Labour’s Remain electorate and bit roles for the SNP, Greens and Plaid. Job done.

And finally, it entailed an internal Tory party process to focus all efforts on a battle for electoral victory. It was the prize of power that an election victory can confer that convinced every significant element in the Tory party to work towards that common goal.

Labour has much to learn from the way the Tories were able to re-establish themselves as the main instrument of ruling-class hegemony after a period of great disarray.

Understandably much of the left, for the moment, is consumed in an agony of introspection. How this plays out and which tendency is able to consolidate its leadership will determine whether the Labour Party continues as a reliable instrument for working-class politics or collapses into consensus politics.

How the reconstituted Tory leadership was able to secure unity in the service of power and how Labour’s divisions were played to make its defeat a near certainty is the pivot on which the selection of Labour’s leadership must turn.