Thread by @Alex_Niven

A lot of people understandably talking about 2010 as “an era comes to an end” etc. It is indeed important to look back on 2010. Here’s what I remember about it ...

Firstly it’s hard now to recall how widely loathed the last Labour government was at the end of its tenure. It’s fine now to reappraise Gordon Brown on “he’s better than most” grounds. But he was an *incredibly* unpopular figure who inspired absolutely zero enthusiasm in 2010

But mostly Labour’s unpopularity at this point was of course down to Blair. After winning in 2005 on the lowest vote share in British electoral history against a shambolic Tory opposition Blair would have been *absolutely massacred* if he’d stayed til 2010 as PM

By 2010 Blair was widely, profoundly hated almost to the point of being a joke figure, as was the outgoing Lab government after expenses, cash for influence etc. The loathing/ridicule probably stopped just short of the general mood about the Tories now. But it was broadly similar

For all the nuanced debates about New Labour’s record we should remember that by 2010 people certainly didn’t *feel* that things had got better since 1997. Indeed these were the days when tabloids made “Broken Britain” stick cos that was broadly the mood (again, not unlike now)

People will point to the outcome of 2010 & compare it to the likely 2024 outcome & rightly argue that 2010 was much closer, Labour’s vote seeming to hold up quite well. But dig deeper & you see that the Labour vote fell off a cliff in 2010 after the already weak result in 2005

It dropped to under 7m in the popular vote for the first time since the clusterfuck of 1931 (for context Corbyn got over 10m in 2019 & nearly double (13m) in 2017). Basically FPTP served Labour well in 2010 and masked the scale of a monumental collapse

So in terms of “getting back on track” to 2010, basically, good luck with that. There are some subtle ways in which 2024 Labour is different from 2010 Labour. But in essentials of ideology, approach, even personnel (see e.g. Cooper, Mandelson etc) the continuity is striking

In short it’s hard to see what Labour (or rather the centrist Lab party establishment) has really learned from the past 14 yrs. I can clearly recall in the immediate aftermath of 2010 figures in the party saying a spell in opposition would lead to some sort of renovation/renewal

My own leftier impulse in 2010 wasn't dissimilar. It seemed like Blairism had been shown up as utterly unfit for government & that whenever Labour got back in it would necessarily be with a strategy that took account for how centrism was unable to respond to the post-2008 world

I was wrong.

END