The sense of direction of Labour happened to be one of Tony Benn’s favourite themes. Benn used to distinguish between weathercocks and weathervanes, in other words instruments for setting the weather or merely pointing  to the direction of the weather. There’s no doubt that Jeremy Corbyn has captured a public mood, with packed venues including in Scotland. So the accusation can’t be levelled at Corbyn that he’s intrinsically unpopular. Such popularity is a difficult evidential fact when it comes to forecasting the electoral success of Labour.

Labour spent a long period of time in opposition from 1983 – 1997. It is statistically rather improbable that Labour will return to being the main party of government in a relatively short space of time. But it is possible. It became possible for the SNP to capture many longstanding seats once held by Labour. The rise of Corbyn inevitably causes there to be yet again post mortems about Labour’s years in the wilderness, as we relive the old battles of whether industry needs to be renationalised, whether ‘the right’ need to split off, whether we should be spending quite so much on nuclear disarmament, and so on. I feel it would be wrong to characterise these as old battles, though. I think many of these issues are largely unresolved in fact, and the popularity of rail renationalisation is a testament to that. What though is appealing to Corbyn is that he unashamedly is rewriting the narrative to suit him. He is not trying too hard to triangulate. For example, in response to the exhaustively argued ‘there’s no money tree’. Corbyn has effectively planted a money tree to print money to fund hospitals and schools; his mechanism for creating wealth in the  name of public assets is a large ‘fuck off’ to those people who’ve relentlessly pedalled the notion that the UK economy is a household budget – which in fact it isn’t.

Corbyn’s pitch is populist. Many people still disagree violently with Tony Blair’s hard entry into Iraq, even now. And Corbyn has found a gap in the market, in acknowledging poverty, and in the pain which the welfare ‘reforms’ have inflicted on those who are trying to live with disability. And there are many reasons to be glad about what Jeremy is bringing to the table in terms of political opinions. The problem that I have fundamentally with critics of Tony Blair is that the issue that they dislike him so strongly they rarely give him any credit at all – e.g. for the human rights act, or the national minimum wage. I think an all out attack on Blairism threatens to throw the baby out with the bathwater – in the same way perhaps Nick Clegg was not the man to pitch AV to the country at the height of his unpopularity.

Likewise, I don’t think it’s possible to put Blair on a pedestal. The love for Tony Blair was clearly palpable at the Progress meeting, an interview with Matt Forde. Glimpses were provided of Blair’s lack of invincibility, however. Blair took the criticism about the lack of ‘succession planning’ well. Most of us can agree that, whatever one’s views about Blairism or Brownism, the succession planning following Tony Blair has been pretty awful. The ‘sustainability’ of Blairism is so inherently hard to define, because of the patchwork nature of Blairism. For example, one can say that the foundations for equality, e.g. LBGT rights, were advanced under Blair’s tenure. One cannot escape the effect, either, of the devolution policies. Enoch Powell said famously of the election of Tony Blair that his election spelt the end of the Union.

We all know the Unions have had a really torrid time for the last 50 years at least. Labour only came to power in 1974 with a majority of less than a handful, and even that was whittled away. Harold Wilson even did a tour of the country slagging off the 1983 election manifesto, upon which both Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn were in fact elected. There’s a lot of history there which is hard for some members of Labour to forget – for example the perceived lack of support by Neil Kinnock for Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Miners. The fact that unions uphold employment rights has never been more important, given the onslaught against employment security in recent years in the name of ‘flexibility’. Where Tony Blair might have done things differently is, rather than returning to a golden age of collective bargaining, his ‘experts’ might have given some thought to how the interests of the disparate army of underemployed people might be protected. This is of crucial importance in the era of the zero hour contracts, or the abolition of working tax credits. The Unions likewise were en masse ignored in the negotiations over the private finance initiative. Some senior of members have relentlessly argued that the private finance initiative is an example of Labour ‘fixing the roof while the sun was shining’, but others have identified the initiative as the root cause of crippling debt in the NHS. The marketisation of social care has been a disaster, and the fact that so many NHS Trusts are financially distressed remains a cause of concern, given their vulnerability to be taken over from the private sector under international law.

Also at Matt Forde’s event was Blair’s proclamation that the NHS is ‘not fundamentally about 5000 nurses, but the power of Big Data’. This is of course is music to the corporates’ ears. Short of implanting a giant 3D printer in Richmond House, Blair could not have made his intentions for ‘our NHS’ any clearer. But Blair has helped to sow the seeds of the problems in the NHS, and it has been a failure of successive governments to deal with them. Social care funding is on its knees, and whenever social care is referred to by politicians it invariably is in the case of propping up the NHS rather than being a very valuable profession in itself.  There were no column inches for the closure of the College for Social Work, compared to the closure of Kid’s Company, for example. Here, Corbyn is onto something which has widespread public acceptance – the idea that the current Government is not entitled to sell off assets which has seen decades of taxpayers’ money (or ‘our money’ as Thatcher called it) paid into it.

Whoever comes to be leader of UK Labour then needs to come to terms with the sustainability of policy – and come to sustainability fast. This bridges across all policy areas, for example devolution, PFI, employment rights, social care; and cannot be solely solved by an approach solely reliant on Corbyn or Blair. I feel that there will be shocks to come, for example whether the UK ‘exits’ Europe or not, but the diversity of thought within Labour should not be seen as a source of weakness or division, but rather as a source of resilience or strength. It is true that Labour has come to represent a coalition of different views, and no one leader can come to bridge them all. There are practical problems in the short term, such as the new Labour leader being able to make some sort of offering to Green, SNP and UKIP voters, as well as Conservative ones ideally. Labour has been for a long time a divided party, and many of Labour’s leaders have successfully come to terms with that. Nye Bevan used to claim that it’s not where you’ve come from, but where you’re going to.

There’s a feeling that Corbyn is a ‘mistake’ as the City will hate Corbyn, being the substantial part of the GDP wealth creators. But then again the cutbacks in the name of austerity have been to a large extent precipitated with a £3TN bailout to recapitalise the banking sector. The Conservatives did agree with Labour’s stance on light touch regulation of the banks, and the overall comprehensive spending reviews, but the car which crashed was due to Labour deliberately loosening the seat belts. Many thousands of people being taken off the disability living allowance registers do not feel happy at being punished for this, and have finally found a voice for this having waited unsuccessfully from Ed Miliband or Rachel Reeves. It can, however, never be the case that the City or the right-wing press have a sense of entitlement as to who runs the country, and many within Labour whatever the political beliefs or entryism into the party are quite excited about an enthusiastic sense of democracy.

But Corbyn is not replaying 1983. To belittle him as such is to misread him fundamentally. Whoever wins the Labour leadership will need to carve out a long term future for the UK, which won’t be easy. Demonisation of Blair or Corbyn won’t help.