Back  in 1994 Tony Blair sealed the deal with many of us when he was billed as “the man the Tories most fear”. After the crushing blow of losing in 1992 we wanted a winner. Damn his policies! As the late Tony Banks exclaimed “my members will eat shit to see a Labour government”.

Blair was given enormous latitude. The party was desperate to break its losing streak. We got hooked on successful – but corrosive – habits about stifling internal debate and adopting an approach to discipline that would make a Gordonstoun headmaster blush. But that approach helped keep us in power for 13 years; albeit with a long trail of political capital and supporters leaching out on the road behind us.

We now find ourselves in the middle of Labour’s first truly modern leadership campaign; one that eschews the left/right factionalism of the past and the fatalism we used to have about whether we could actually win power at all. It is opening up debate in a way that we are unused to.

But we have to be careful we don’t overuse our new gifts. There is a balance to be struck between embracing the party’s new glasnost and forgetting the old ways – and why we adopted them in the first place.

At the moment, there’s a lot of tummy tickling going on but not much vision. We need a discussion about how do we equip ourselves for a world where coalition governments may become commonplace. Where there is less money to spend our way to our social democratic nirvana. Where we articulate our own version of The Big Society. Where we back up our grand rhetoric on localism and environmentalism with real commitments next time. But these kind of hard-edged issues are simply not breaking through. (more…)