It is often said that generals going to war tend to refight their last war, and economists, the last depression. And there is indeed a strong sense that the British Labour Party's leadership election is as much about refighting not so much the last war, as one or two before that. The unwise, patronising intervention of former PM Tony Blair to suggest that supporters of left-wing Jeremy Corbyn, currently the surprising front-runner, are in need of a "transplant" seemed to confirm as much. As did the riposte of his former deputy, John Prescott, to remind Blair that, after all, he should remember that the Iraq war had a lot to do with why voters deserted the party. Blasts from the past!
Not only does there appear to be an escape to the past in the arguments and rhetoric of the campaign, but some commentators also say they see a weary resignation in the leadership candidates that the party, traumatised by its recent defeat, is also incapable of winning the next election. But Labour has been here before – in 1992 many predicted its demise only to see it rebound to one of its greatest victories in 1997.
The challenge for Labour is admittedly huge. A political think tank on Thursday estimated that it must win an extra 100 seats to regain a majority, and must do so by taking seats across the country and Scotland, not only in the wealthy southeast and Middle England whose various prejudices are so preoccupying the other candidates, all New Labour, Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall, and Yvette Cooper.
Their contention that Labour’s economic credibility, most notably its “overspending” under Brown and Blair, and its refusal in the recent election to campaign for fiscal tightening, were critical to the defeat and to its future prospects is, however, only part of the story. Corbyn’s insistently, radical anti-austerity message is just as capable of playing well to other constituencies that deserted Labour in the north and particularly in Scotland where the party was wiped out from the left by the nationalists.
Corbyn’s Syriza-like message has also been playing particularly well with the party’s own rank and file, specifically trade unionists and most of the 50,000 new members who have joined up since the election – a third of them under 30 – the future of the party. On Tuesday a YouGov poll of party members shocked the party establishment by predicting he would defeat Burnham on the last count by 53 to 47 per cent.
But the rank and file is not the electorate, and Labour's dilemma is once again that of ideological parties, a classic attempt to reconcile head and heart, electability and principle, or what the Guardian's Martin Kettle calls "purity and power". Is Labour, old heads warn, heading for electoral oblivion and/or a further SDP-like split ? History and old wars replayed?