It’s over. Labour’s only hope is the next generation

23 September 2009

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Martin Bright, a lifelong Labour supporter, on why all of those who have led the party to its present sorry state must now stand aside

In defeat, the Labour party must show the kind of humility it took the Tories a decade to learn. The unexpected success of David Cameron in the party’s leadership contest came as the result of his allies’ close examination of the New Labour project. The younger generation of Labour politicians should make a similar study of how Cameron came from nowhere to lead the party.

Sometimes it is wisest to know what you cannot know. If the Labour party has any sense, it will accept that it will have barely heard the name of the person who will lead them to what may yet be victory in 2014. There will be several false starts, much soul-searching and — above all — a genuine hunger for power before the party reaches that stage.

The answer will not lie in Labour’s so-called lost generation of Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper, David and Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham and Purnell. If they genuinely have the interests of the party at heart, they will drift gracefully into middle age and not make a bid for the top job. They were the future — once. But from next year their names must be consigned to the past as definitively as Healey, Callaghan, Hattersley, Kinnock, Blair and Brown will be.

Few, if any, of these issues will be discussed at what will probably be Labour’s last conference before its next leadership election. More is the pity. When electoral defeat is a given, a party must start thinking seriously about how it might recover. And Labour is in no fit state to do even that.