To win at the ballot box, the opposition party needs to ditch Blairite policies and offer a radical anti-establishment narrative
Maybe it was all a dream. Five years ago, I remember squeezing into my seat in Labour’s packed Liverpool conference venue to hear the news that Jeremy Corbyn had been re-elected as leader, seeing off Owen Smith’s challenge with an increased mandate. The years that followed were a lesson in the fragility of hope and progress. But they were also, for anyone who even broadly supported the new Labour left, a moment in which mass engagement and genuine alternatives returned to the political mainstream for the first time in decades.
Even in defeat, it felt as if the Corbyn project had conclusively demonstrated that a radical domestic programme was Labour’s path back to power. In 2017, Labour enjoyed the biggest increase in its share of the vote since 1945 and, given the overwhelming popularity of its manifestos, the public backed Corbyn’s policy on water renationalisation by a margin of two to one, its policy of railway renationalisation by three to one and its taxation policy by more than that. Few could credibly argue that its drubbing in 2019 was down to its policy agenda.