There’s an honourable tradition in the Labour Party of bravely standing against an unjust war – as long as the war ended several years ago. So, one by one, Labour’s leadership candidates are announcing their opposition to the invasion of Iraq, just in time for it all to end. Labour leaders did a similar thing after the Vietnam War, and the First World War, and at the moment they all support keeping the army in Afghanistan, but I bet they haven’t a good word for the Second Crusades, which is the main thing.

Maybe the whole anti-war movement should follow this example, as it would make people feel more effective than campaigning against wars still going on. Imagine how powerful demonstrators would feel if they held a Stop the Crimean War march. Someone could announce at the rally afterwards that it had indeed stopped, 160 years ago. Then, instead of the usual feelings of impotence, everyone would go home delighted.

Ed Balls and the Milibands have distanced themselves this week from the war they supported, so to get ahead Ed Miliband will now say he’s going on the march, adding that he would have gone on it at the same time as everyone else seven years ago but he was waiting in for a wardrobe to be delivered and it’s only just come.

Ed Miliband now says he “believed the UN inspectors should have been given more time,” although he doesn’t appear to have said this back then, presumably as he was saving up this comment for when it really mattered. Next he’ll say “and I’m a firebrand on the Corn Laws now I’ve made my mind up”. And David will say: “I did vote for the war, but I had a dream that me and a squirrel were stuck in a windmill in Basra, which shows that my subconscious was firmly against it.”

David Miliband, the only one lucky enough to be an MP at the time, says he supported the war because of evidence of Saddam’s famous “weapons”, adding he would have opposed it “if we had known then what we know now”. But the only reason people believed Saddam had those weapons was because Miliband’s government was telling everyone he did. So, he’s saying: “If I’d known I was lying it would have been different, but how could I possibly know I was making stuff up? You can’t blame me for fooling myself, as I’m very persuasive.”

David Miliband is also accused of being complicit in handing suspects over to be tortured, so maybe he’ll try a similar defence, saying: “If I’d known at the time that torture could include pain I would never have approved of it. But someone told me electrodes were more tingly than unpleasant, like one of those strange chairs that massages your back. Still, you live and learn.”

Something similar has happened on other issues as well, so ministers who’ve advised and voted in favour of making their party friendly to the City are now appalled by the greedy bankers they spent 15 years admiring. It was all done to place Labour in the centre, but what they didn’t see is that the centre can change place, and what was once seen as extreme, such as opposing wars and despising bankers, is now mainstream.

Otherwise why would they all have discovered the war was wrong right now? Even a month ago they said nothing, so they’ve all just changed their minds, have they? Some people might suspect they’ve decided to oppose the war because they figure this will help them get elected as leader, and they supported it before to help their careers, and the effect of their decisions on the fate of millions of people has played no part in their judgement at any time. But that would be cynical so let’s just accept it must be a coincidence.

But also, there were plenty of others who weren’t fooled by the shady evidence, so surely the Labour Party would do better to entrust the leadership to people who weren’t so easily duped. There’s contender John McDonnell, who opposed the war from the start, and others include Damon Albarn, Zoe Ball, Chris Eubank, Leo Sayer and Jimmy Hill, who should surely form the basis of a far more principled, astute and imaginative shadow Cabinet.

Independent Wednesday, 26 May 2010

It is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in the political book, which is why it is always played by an incoming government at the expense of their defeated opponents. Dirty up the record of your vanquished predecessors in order to cast the blame in their direction for everything wrong and make yourself look like a refreshing change. The voters will probably give you the benefit of believing this because they have just chosen to eject the people you are damning.
The historian Tristram Hunt, newly elected as Labour MP for Stoke, puts it nicely: “Ever since the scribes of the Renaissance branded the Middle Ages as ‘the Dark Ages’, propagandists have deployed history to codify the future. You rubbish the past as a lost opportunity of waste, indecision and stupidity. And you celebrate the present as a blessed release from such hopelessness.”
The coalition will want to blacken Labour’s record. The Tories and the Lib Dems will have an additional incentive to do so in order to displace on to their inheritance from Labour the blame for the excruciating spending cuts and accompanying tax rises. Blame not us, but them, will be the cry from the government side. David Cameron gave Labour a taste of this medicine during the opening debate on the Queen’s Speech when the Tory leader scorned Harriet Harman for failing to begin her contribution with an apology for leaving the place in such a mess.
If new governments are fortunate, they are helped by the behaviour of the opponents who have just been dumped out of power as the defeated sink into tortured introspection. The opening phase of the contest for the Labour leadership is already an orgy of competitive self-flagellation. The contenders come not to praise New Labour, but to bury it. This was to be expected from Diane Abbott and John McDonnell, the two leftwingers who hope to get on the ballot. Both were declared enemies of the Labour government even when it was in power. They were disillusioned with New Labour before it had even taken office and became more disaffected with Tony Blair the more elections he won.
It is more eyebrow-raising that the denigration of New Labour has also been joined by the Miliband brothers, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham, a quartet who served their political apprenticeships in the courts of Blair and Brown and then ascended to the cabinet. They are jostling to criticise the government of which they were very recently prominent members.
David Miliband says that New Labour is done with. He is especially sharp about its timidity in tackling the City and the super-rich. He suggests that New Labour was too trapped in the 1980s and 1990s and has little to teach the party now. In its place, he proposes “Next Labour”, a concept still in search of a definition from him or any of his rivals.
His younger brother traces the beginning of the decline to the Iraq war which led to a “catastrophic loss of trust”. Ed Miliband is not wrong about that, but he stretches our credulity when he claims that, had he been an MP then, he would have voted against the invasion. Had he been at Mr Brown’s side at the time rather than on sabbatical in America, I am pretty certain he would have acted exactly as his older brother and Ed Balls did. Once Tony Blair had fixed on war, and Gordon Brown had decided to back it, their aides all worked together to win a majority for it in Parliament.
Ed Balls identifies the abolition of the 10p tax band as a major misjudgment of Gordon Brown’s premiership which did Labour’s reputation serious damage amongst the party’s natural supporters. There’s no arguing with that, but the needle on my bullshit detector is in the red zone when Mr Brown’s closest ally suggests that he was secretly opposed to scrapping the 10p band all along. Others who were inside the Treasury at the time of that decision remember things rather differently.
Andy Burnham does not resile from the Iraq war, which at least makes him stand out from the others and may be enough to secure Tony Blair’s vote, assuming the former prime minister is still a member of the Labour party. Mr Burnham does agree with other contestants that Labour lost touch with the concerns of people who ought to be among its supporters and failed to respond to discontent about immigration, antisocial behaviour and crime.
Labour’s first instinct when it has lost power is always to go through a period of flaying the leadership for betraying the party’s ideals and voters when they were in office. The novelty this time around is that those who were part of the leadership are doing the whipping. To a point, this is natural and even desirable. Labour did commit grave blunders in office. Labour does need to understand why it received a miserable 29% of the vote, just a percentage point higher than Michael Foot in 1983, which made it the party’s worst performance in a general election since the First World War.
Some of the reasons for that defeat are so bleeding obvious that they need not detain the leadership contenders for much time. Labour presided over the worst recession since the 1930s. Three terms is a long stretch in power. Thirteen years turned New Labour old, tired, unimaginative and crippled by the burden of its mistakes.
David Miliband is right to say: “In a change election, we were perceived to be defending the old order. Future is the most important word in politics, but we looked out of time.” Ed Miliband is correct to say: “We came to seem more caretakers than idealists – more technocratic than transformative.” Ed Balls accurately observes: “People felt we had stopped listening.”
These are obvious accounts of some of the reasons why Labour lost. They are also ways of not addressing some subjects which are just too uncomfortable for these candidates. None of them has much to say about Gordon Brown beyond offering encomiums to the departed prime minister. Labour is a sentimental party that doesn’t like to kick an ex-leader when he is down and out. The truth, which members of the last cabinet will only admit to in private, is that Gordon Brown’s lack of communication skills, strategic failure to renew Labour in office and personal unpopularity probably cost the party around 40 seats at the election.
That is the difference between the Con-Lib coalition that is now governing Britain and the Lab-Lib coalition that might have been under a different leader. This is difficult history for Ed Balls because he ran the 2006 coup against Tony Blair to lever Gordon Brown into Number 10. This is tricky territory too for Ed Miliband because he was part of the Brownite team that then stitched up the succession so that their master was crowned without a contest. David Miliband and Andy Burnham sat in the cabinet that knew Gordon Brown was leading Labour over the cliff edge but never summoned up the nerve to do anything about it.
None of the candidates seems any keener to discuss the size of the deficit, why it grew too large and how they’d be tackling it. This is not to say that the scale of the defeat was simply down to the last prime minister. New Labour was too insolent about civil liberties, too cringeing to high finance, too tolerant of sleaze, insufficiently dynamic about public services and too crabbed about welfare and constitutional reform.
Labour will only be on the road to recovery once it understands why it lost. Yet it is unlikely to win again if it is so consumed by regret and guilt about its failures that it also forgets what made it a success. Humility about the last government’s vices needs to be balanced with pride in its successes which ranged from peace in Northern Ireland to the minimum wage. It did win three elections in a row, a very rare feat in British politics. That was an achievement the more remarkable given that Labour had never previously held on to power for two full terms. The core New Labour prospectus, that economic efficiency can be combined with social justice and decent public services, remains as attractive in 2010 as it was in 1997. They ought to take it as a compliment that the coalition accepts much of its legacy. At the last election, pollsters found that voters still preferred the values they associated with Labour to the values they associated with the Tories. The problem was that they were sick and tired of Labour government.
The essential insight of the creators of New Labour was that the party could only win and retain power by appealing to both aspirational voters and its more traditional supporters. That will be no less true at the next election. Labour’s next chief will be a failure if he leads the party up a narrow, tribal cul-de-sac. That is precisely the direction in which David Cameron would like to shove them.
As the sons of New Labour bury that which gave them their careers, they need to have a clear view of why it won as well as why it finally went down to defeat. Disavowing everything about the previous 13 years is neither necessary nor wise. And, anyway, there’ll be quite enough dirtying up by the other side.

The bitter cup of defeat was tasted by Labour‘s senior ranks when they made their way to the shadow cabinet room in the House of Commons. Some of them had to ask for directions. Not so David Miliband. He could remember the way. That didn’t make the destination any more pleasant for the man who had just ceased to be foreign secretary.

“I’d last been in that corridor six weeks before the 1997 general election and we were on the march. It’s a very depressing room. You know then, you’re out. It reeks of the absence of power. Just reeks of it. And there aren’t enough seats around the table for everyone. That hit hard.”

Then he strikes a more upbeat note for Labour after the party’s second-worst defeat since 1918: “What’s interesting is that it wasn’t a funeral at the shadow cabinet meeting. It was a group of people determined to fight back.”

Miliband was the first to declare that he wanted to head that fightback and became the early bookies’ favourite, not always a good omen, to win the contest to be Labour’s next leader. There has been a paradoxical cheerfulness in the party’s depleted ranks of MPs. He finds it explicable: “The polls had us third for a significant part of the election campaign. That’s a near-death experience. If you’re in a car crash and you think it’s going to do for you, but actually break your leg, a bit of euphoria is understandable. We’ve got to be clear that now is not a time for euphoria.”

In southern England outside London, Labour has shrunk to 12 seats: “It was a bad defeat.” The scale of the party’s reverse will really be driven home, he thinks, when the Commons meets this week and Labour MPs find themselves greatly outnumbered by the coalition composed of Tories and Lib Dems.

Miliband soon dials up more reasons to be cheerful. He is an innately optimistic character as well as a clever one, and a man who needs to persuade his party not to despair.

“Our party activists and our voters are amazing people. In the midst of this barrage of money and media, they stuck with us. This party is not walking into the history books. It’s determined to be a 21st-century party. The fight and the determination and the resilience of the party members, supporters and voters is a great thing. Also there’s energy because we’ve 260 MPs. That’s a 1992 level of MPs, not a 1983 level.”

The “coalition of contradictions” gives Labour both a responsibility and an opportunity to “forge a progressive alliance within the Labour party of all shades of progressive opinion”. But he is not among those in his party who complacently assume that they only have to sit back and wait for the Con-Libs to fall apart.

“We underestimate this coalition at our peril. The Tories have always been about power. Clegg has revealed that actually he’s about power as well. After decades of moral sanctimony from the Liberal Democrats, we can now be absolutely clear that when push comes to shove they’re happy to drop child poverty and the job guarantee.

“But the determination they’ve both shown is something we underestimate at our peril. Because there’s no inevitability about the pendulum swinging. And we are going to have to be very canny about how we position ourselves. The electorate aren’t going to be studying us carefully in this period but they’re going to notice how we behave. And if we go back to yah-boo politics we’ll make a big error.

“We’ve got to be ready for it to fall and we’ve got to be ready for it to go long. It’s very, very important that we have a fighting opposition, not fighting with ourselves but fighting the government where appropriate. And that we’re an alternative government. Whoever is elected is going to have to be a credible prime minister.”

That is a strong strand of his pitch for the leadership: as the most senior former cabinet minister in the running, he will give Labour the most authoritative voice.

Before the party can be renewed, it must make an accurate assessment of why it has just lost: “This was a change election and we were not the party of change. I said in my conference speech last September that ‘future’ is the most important word in politics and we did not convince our fellow citizens that we were the party of the future.”

Some blame him and other senior Labour figures for not replacing a very unpopular leader. The “bottler” label was first, if not really fairly, hung around Miliband’s neck when he did not challenge Gordon Brown in 2007. “I wasn’t ready,” he says, and goes on to defend his subsequent reluctance to try to unseat Brown. Some members of the last cabinet believe voter aversion to Brown cost Labour as many as 40 seats. Miliband does not try to dispute that, but he argues it would be a major mistake to ascribe the scale of the defeat entirely to the failings of one man.

“I think anyone who believes that the result was just because of the leadership is kidding themselves. Gordon spoke very movingly about discovering his own strengths and his own frailties. But anyone who tells you that all we’ve got to do is change the leader and then everything will be fine is wrong.”

Labour failed to win a fourth term because “we all said we needed to renew but we didn’t sufficiently. People felt we were late to the game on issues like political reform. Antisocial behaviour – we lost focus on that. Immigration, late to the game with the Australian points system. Social care, late to the game.

“We were too timid on the role of government in the economy. We were too slow to see that climate change was not an environmental issue. It was an economic, security, foreign policy issue.

“We got told that political reform was a middle-class issue and we basically stopped. We did the freedom of information, human rights act, devolution of Scotland and Wales, London. But we basically got frightened off. It was at best half a political revolution. Maybe a third. We should have done the House of Lords, for goodness’ sake.”

Many of those failings he ascribes to New Labour being a product of the party’s “searing experiences” in the 1980s which prevented it from being bolder either about challenging the status quo or changing how politics is done: “New Labour was a reaction to the 1980s but it was trapped by the 1980s. Anyone who thinks that the future is about re-creating New Labour is wrong. I think we’ve got to use this period to decisively break with that. What I’m interested in is Next Labour.”

It will not be escaped quite that easily. He rose as a protege of Blair; two of his competitors for the leadership were special advisers to Brown. Miliband is emphatic that this does not mean the wars of the TB-GB era are fated to be replayed by a new generation. “The whole thing about Blairites and Brownites is just wrong and gone and over because the policy agenda has changed fundamentally.”

He prickles a little when we suggest it is a weakness that the contest is between apparatchiks of the Blair-Brown era. “David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Jon Cruddas, Andy Burnham… we’re our own people. We’re going to treat the electorate as adults and we should be treated as adults.”

He claims to be relaxed that his younger brother has entered the fray to turn this into the first leadership contest involving siblings: “Family is more important than politics. He’s very talented. But I love him. We’re not going to put that love at risk.”

They were close as children, he says believably, but not competitive, he claims less plausibly. If Ed wins, “of course” David will happily serve under his younger brother. He does not much like the suggestion that Ed is more accomplished at displaying the common touch: “People have to make their own judgment about the two of us. It’s better not to talk about it. It’s better just to do it.” It is on this subject that the normally fluent former foreign secretary is at his most closed down.

Do they disagree on things? “Of course we do. We’re not twins. We’re not clones.” But on what they disagree he will not say. He expects their mother, a staunch Labour member, to avoid choosing: “She’s not an abstaining type, but I think she’ll be abstaining this time.”

It will not, though, be a case of Labour being offered any leader it likes as long as he’s called Miliband. Ed Balls is taking “soundings” before deciding to run. The Miliband brothers certainly love each other a lot more than either of them do the former children’s secretary. When we suggest they can gang up on that rival, he chooses to laugh rather to deny it.

Another highly likely contender is Cruddas who performed very well in the last deputy leadership contest. Aware that some on the left, where Cruddas is popular, regard Miliband with suspicion, he says: “He’s taught me a lot, Jon Cruddas. He’s been talking about housing for a long time. He’s been talking about community organising for a long time. He’s fought the BNP. I think uniting different talents is an important job. Because it’s not ideologically riven, this party. There’s enough shades to make it interesting but I don’t see incompatibilities.”

That offers not so much an olive branch to the left as an olive grove.

When it is time to have his picture taken, he points to an oil painting given to him by his wife and asks: “Do we want these naked women behind me? Is that good?” The photographer thinks not.

The pictures taken, he tells one of his young sons that he will read him a story, but it will be “nighty-night time at half past six”.

As one of Britain’s youngest foreign secretaries, David Miliband swaggered the world stage in the company of Hillary Clinton. Now his sway is reduced to deciding on bedtime for his boys. If and when he and his party wield power again will depend on whether the contest for its leadership really does begin Labour’s renewal.

Where does the Labour Party go now?

Sunder Katwala, general secretary of the Fabian Society
Labour lost the election – so has spent a week on a rollercoaster ride through the classic stages of the grieving process. Denial, as the exit polls and new Commons provided an arithmetical hope of staying in. Bargaining, over a Lib Dem deal and anger at the “vote Clegg, get Cameron” Tory-Lib Dem coalition outcome. Can Labour arrive at acceptance? Parties that lose democraticelections must acknowledge that they deserved to do so.

Will Labour now have a proper debate about its record and future? Not if the only question is which Miliband brother to vote for as the next leader. An open (and indeed fraternal) leadership contest is essential, after the 2007 coronation, but concluding this too quickly would be a big mistake. The Conservatives twice failed to have any proper inquest into election defeats: only in 2005 did Michael Howard provide more time and space. (That is also why David Cameron, not David Davis, won.)

Labour, too, should run its leadership contest through the autumn – using the party conference as a debating showcase – and take the chance to bring many more people back to Labour to take part. That will take a different, more open party culture and to restore its instinct for civil liberties too.

We may learn little if, before anybody has properly studied this complex election, everybody just says what they thought already, repeating their favourite leftist or New Labour mantras, about losing C2s over immigration, or failing to inspire with Labour values.

So we must not be frozen in a timewarp debate about whether we stay “New Labour” or not. New Labour achieved a great deal – but that was a long time ago. A broad winning majority for the Britain of 2015, not 1995, means imagining and mobilising the next left, not trying to reconstruct the last political generation.

Tessa Jowell, MP for Dulwich and West Norwood
We lost the election in the marginal constituencies along the M1, M2 and M6, the spinal cords of middle England.

In 2010 there was nothing much to lighten the hearts of those who had flocked to vote for us in the heady days of 13 years ago. We had huge achievements to our credit – new hospitals, rebuilt schools, renewed infrastructure, rising standards in education and health, all undeniable – but voters don’t thank you for what you’ve done; they rightlywant to know how you will make their future better.

In an adverse economic climate, in the face of a largely hostile press, and against the easy claim that it was time for a change, our account of a Labour future was timid. We were hearing, but not listening to, people’s fears about migration, immigration and housing shortages.

The election results were spotty, and what stood out were the results of MPs who worked hard in their constituencies, championed local causes, knew their patch intimately, worked to make real lives better, and listened and responded to what local people had to say.

While politics may be becoming more presidential at the top, it’s solid campaigning and community work year round in the constituencies that will hold the line in a bad year and advance the cause in a good one. From this also come the best ideas for the future, authentic and rooted in real lives.

For the future, how we do politics will be as important as what we do. But to own the future we must stop and listen, and admit in humility that the answers will be found in the values we have always believed in and articulated in the mouths of the people we hope once again to serve.

Chuka Umunna, newly elected MP for Streatham
I wouldn’t wish Conservative government on my constituents, but we are where we are and opposition gives Labour the chance to refresh and renew, which eluded us in government.

Clearly there is much to be proud of and we must build on our achievements. But we also made mistakes and lost the election: we need to acknowledge that and explore why, in a cool, calm way, without entering into some factional blame game.

In some respects, the generation of politicians ahead of me came to be defined by their loyalty to one of our last two leaders – now both have moved on. Unshackled by the travails of office, the leaders-to-be can tell us what they are all about. As a humble new MP, I’m excited at the prospect.

There should no rushed coronation, beauty contest or stitch-up. In Harriet Harman, we have an excellent caretaker leader in place – this affords us the time to have a proper debate, so as many people as possible should throw their hats into the ring.

The scale of transformation required to resolve the economic, democratic and environmental crises is a challenge. How do we go about tackling them? We want to know the answers each leadership candidate is offering.

Moreover, the contest gives us a golden opportunity to become a mass membership party once more. Anyone joining now will be able to participate in the contest. To those who left the party over the years – in some cases drifting to the Lib Dems in the hope of finding something more progressive – we should say: come back and shape the future direction of the Labour party so you feel at one with it again

Fiona Millar, journalist and former adviser to Cherie Blair
The Labour party has a real opportunity. We can’t shirk the fact that we lost but, for all the slick Clegg/Cameron rhetoric, this will be a socially conservative government, made up of people who won’t use the public services they are cutting and are not really concerned with fairness and equality. Many Liberal Democrat voters feel betrayed. We should encourage them to join us and build a much broader coalition.

We must do better at defending our record in government and explaining it in language people understand. We all have policies that we didn’t agree with, but overall the Blair/Brown governments did much good. Where were the big arguments about childcare and family-friendly working in the election campaign?

We need to build on the best of the last 13 years and politely park the worst. I fear the leadership election will be quickly styled as yet another battle between the “modernisers” and the “dinosaurs”, with pressure for us to start second-guessing where the Tory/Libs will go and become a “Cameron-lite” party. That would be a disaster.

I’d like to see an end to the idea that we can run everything like a private market. People want high-quality, flexible, local, accountable public services, good enough to be used by all. Personally I want policies that genuinely help the poorest children. I am sceptical about the pupil premium, which doesn’t address the fact that about 80% of a child’s life chances are determined by their circumstances outside school. Labour began as a party of aspiration. That is still so, but it needs to be explicitly married to progressive values.

Observer