Quote Originally Posted by Kieran_Frost View Post
Starmer losing because of Iraq is like saying Corbyn lost because of Brexit. It's not the why. Not even close.
The biggest problem for Labour as a party is that they are a completely schismatic party without internal consensus. That schism heightened with Brexit where a lot of Labour constituencies were Pro-Brexit and Leavers while the party HQ in London were Remainers, including the one Labour lost in Hartlepool (a constitutency they voted Leave but Starmer decided to field a Remainer candidate). If you want to trace that schism back to a source, the Iraq War is obviously the start of the party's troubles.

I just don't see it. People don't vote like this. They don't associate one leader with the votes of a leader 15 years ago, UNLESS that person is the direct protege of... and even then, it's a stretch to think that is THE turning of the tide when it comes to election wins and loses.
If you want a narrative for the party in terms of "Why nobody after Blair?" then I think you need to look at the most defining aspect of Blair's legacy, and that obviously is his hand-in-glove support of Dubya Bush which led to this extensive public report which more or less confirmed that Blair had no grounds or national-security reason for taking UK into that war.

I think, in the discussion about 'how can Labour win an election' looking to THE ONLY Labour leader to win an election in 50 years and ask "what did he do that others haven't?"... is fair game, no?
Nope.

Because it assumes that
a) Blair's victory and his campaign can be replicated.
b) His victory was entirely down to him and not to the Conservatives failure to field proper candidates.
c) That the same manifesto and platform that campaigned in the '90s can be replicated again.
d) Blair's campaign wasn't a result of a certain technological and cultural moment which has come and gone and been subsumed across all parties.
e) That electioneering can be divorced from legacy of governance, because it can't.

The fact is that the Tories learned from Tony Blair and his slick PR-heavy politicking and under Boris Johnson they have someone who's Tony Blair but without any delusions of conscience, why have the Draco Malfoy who pretends he's Harry Potter when you can have Draco Malfoy himself. There's no way that Labour can go back to Blair and compete against the guy who was his biggest student.

The Democrat party these days isn't any more the "party of Bill Clinton" (in the 2020 DNC Bill had about the same screentime and runtime as Jimmy Carter did and these days, Carter has the better reputation than Bill, lol). The Labour party should not be the party of Tony Blair certainly, and it doesn't need to be. I will admit that the Dems having Obama in power after Bill has allowed them to neuter the corrosive effect of his legacy (it's the reason why Obama's VP got elected Prez while Bill's VP and his wife failed both times).