Yes and no.
Blair and New Labour had a positive, forward thinking ideology and pledged - clearly, loudly and repeatedly to invest sensibly in public services: welfare, eduction, health care etc, and stressing the benefits of doing so. Sure they embraced the markets and toned down the socialist rhetoric, but they were still left wing both in practise and rhetoric, albeit more to the centre left. Brown in particular was very ideological. They demonstrated to the electorate that they were capable and reliable, but the messaging was still largely one of positivity, progress, change.
In contrast the current Labour strategy is a pale and cynical imitation without any of the positivity. It's rhetoric is cautious, negative and transparently desperate to avoid saying anything remotely progressive, or frankly anything non-conservative.
I work in health care, my partner works in the civil service, and it's terrifying that the Labour leader can't even give clear support for either. Rather he talks in a guarded, cynical tone. I, my colleagues, and others in health care and the civil service are not hard core communists, we're just people who want to have careers providing a skilled public service to the best of our abilities, with the minimal expectation of a reasonable standard of living, reasonable working conditions and adequate funding for our workplaces. I want regular people in my community to have a standard of living that is comparable to other European countries. I want the sick, disabled and out of luck to have a humane safety net and opportunites to progress. I want my schools, hospitals, transport and other government departments to be well staffed and equipped. I want the ever increasing gap between the rich and poor to be at least halted, if not reversed. Yet the leader of the fecking Labour Party is too scared to advocate confidently for any of this. These aren't radical beliefs, these are common sense practical beliefs, that a competent Labour leader should be able to advocate for in a convincing manner. Not mutter in hushed tones about public sector workers, the unemployed, the sick, or people on low incomes as though they don't want to be associated with them.
The problem for Labour the past few elections wasn't beliefs/policies, it was that the messaging was weak and the leaders polarising. Sure, Starmer is less polarising. Everyone agrees he's a charmless husk, a careerirst with no strong beliefs, doing a tame impersonation of some sort of Blair-Cameron hybrid. But he doesn't have the positivity of Blair (and certainly not the economic skill of Brown), nor does he have the intelligence or business acumen/networking of Cameron/Osborne. He's taking the worst of each rather than the best of either.
The strategy is simply a decade late. Miliband or even Corbyn would have benefited from embracing parts of this strategy, to varying extents. They might even have won if they had done so. But there has been seismic change since then. The cost of living crisis, inflation, people are struggling. Even the more centrist or right leaning folk I know are fed up with the Tories and want something different. They might vote Labour, but not because Starmer is praising Thatcher, downplaying the prospect of investing public services, or trying to out do the Tories on anti-immigration rhetoric. But because the Tories have failed, regular people are getting royally fecked over and our public services have been pushed to breaking point. Labour should walk this election. Miliband or Corbyn would have sailed to victory if they were in Starmer's position. So imagine the landslide if there was a competent, passionate Labour leader. A landslide victory that would pave the way for future election strategies for decades.
