Want Labour to do well? Stop arguing over this man

Imagine for a moment that you are interviewing to become the CEO of a large, established company. The company has had a great deal of success in the recent past but is now struggling. It has lost its way it is your aim in your interview to help it find it again. In the meantime, its main competitor has reinvented itself—moving from its once stuffy and conservative approach to one of breath-taking audacity. You may be convinced this approach will soon fail based on its internal contradictions, but for now, they are stealing your once loyal customer base.

When preparing the inevitable presentation that will come with the job interview, you will be given all sorts of advice for the role. Some of that will come from people who have done the job before you. They know the organisation and its customers inside out and they were once extremely successful at bringing one to the other. Sure, it was in the days before Facebook was even a thing and Brexit changed everything. But that doesn’t mean that their approach isn’t worth a glance.

I’m going to drop this tortured analogy now. But it’s worth thinking about how we would behave in those circumstances, because what those seeking to lead the Labour Party at the moment are going through is the world’s longest, dullest job interview. And I’m not sure that they are either being asked the right questions or taking the right approach to the answers.

Every Labour member has a view on what they want to see happen now. Every Labour member is chiming in asking questions of the candidates on a range of policy areas close to their hearts. It seems that every time we seek to elect someone to the top role, we forget what we actually want them to do in the job. It is not the leader’s job to set policy. So, while their approach to our economy, Brexit or immigration might give us a sense of their politics, endless focus on this will tell us nothing about their approach to running the Labour Party and seeking to make it once again an electable force.

However, simply harking back to the days when Labour was elected repeatedly isn’t that helpful either. We can’t simply replicate the policies and spin of the past and hope that we will also replicate their success.

A politics that worked before social media has limitations in a world where the news agenda is defined by the tweets of the President of the USA. An economic approach that balanced light-touch regulation with sharing the proceeds of growth has little to tell us about an era where the biggest existential threat is climate change. There are also unlikely to be many proceeds of growth for a while as Brexit hits the economy—not to mention the fact that some are warning of another crash as disastrous as that of 2008.

What good leaders understand is that their role is to respond to the needs of the moment and the electorate. In debating which past leader we most want our candidates to emulate the Labour membership (across the board) do their party a disservice. A good leader will be nothing like the past—be that the past of 2019, 2015, 2010, 2005, 1992, 1983 or beyond. They must forge their own path to electability that deals with the challenges of the immediate future.

The Labour Party has far too great a tendency to wallow in nostalgia. Even nostalgia for people who at the time castigated the party for being backward looking. As they get further from power, Labour members seek to bathe in the comfort of old victories more readily than they are willing or able to put in the hard work needed to create new ones. Instead, a fundamental belief that the Tories are evil and useless and eventually will fail is put in place of recognising our own failures and working on them.

Is Brexit going to be terrible? Yes, probably. But that doesn’t mean either that the Tories will get the blame or that Labour will be in a position to be trusted enough to capitalise on it.

Brexit is an unprecedented challenge. And the thing about things that have no precedent is that they also have no ‘off the shelf’ ‘here’s one I made earlier’ solutions. So while leaders should be open to listening to good ideas from any and all quarters, they must also set their own pace and style. They must take charge of the changes that are needed from top to bottom and make them their way. And the people who know that best are the people who have done it before them.

Labour will only ever start to be ready to win again when it realises there is no future in the past.