This article appeared in the December issue of Total Politics

History is written by the victors. Which is problematic if you’ve just been kicked out of office with 29 per cent of the popular vote.

The Labour Party is currently experiencing an identity crisis. Part of that is the natural reaction to an election defeat, and part is the struggle to identify where to position itself in relation to the economic and political turmoil of the global banking crisis. But it’s also partly a reflection of Labour’s inability to come to terms with, and own, its own past.

For a movement supposedly steeped in tradition, Labour is a poor curator of its own history. “Look at how the party leadership decided to ignore the party’s 100th anniversary [in 1999],” said MP Jon Cruddas, currently delivering a series of lectures on Labour’s history at University College Oxford. “At the time, everything had to be new. Anything to do with the past was old, and negative, and had all the wrong associations.”

Under New Labour, the past became politicised. As Tony Blair himself happily admits, the lesson he took from Labour’s history was a need to get himself as far away from it as possible. “I had studied our party history closely,” he recounts in his own contribution, his autobiography My Journey; “and concluded that to win, the party had to move beyond itself, and the leader had to be more than a party leader.” Contrary to popular myth, under Blair history was not excised. Instead, it was subjected to a show trial, of which the Clause 4 abolition was the most famous example.

As Greg Rosen, chairman of the Labour History Group, argues, this uncompromising repudiation of his party’s legacy, while superficially successful, ultimately proved shortsighted. “A lot, though not all, of the people around Tony had a Year Zero approach to history,” he says. “That created a number of problems. It actually meant they weren’t in a position to learn from, and avoid, some of the mistakes of previous governments. It also meant that, by distancing themselves from Labour’s history, they allowed others to lay claim to it. And it meant that a lot of the decisions in government were informed by the myths surrounding Labour’s past, rather than the reality.”

Having removed itself from Blair’s shoulder, pausing only to punch Gordon Brown in the solar plexus, the hand of history now beckons Ed Miliband. And the word is Labour’s leader wants to see his party’s heritage reclaimed. Influential Labour peer Lord Glasman is encouraging him to recast himself as a “radical traditionalist”, while his recent party conference speech, as The Guardian points out, was, “at root a speech in an ethical socialist tradition with deep roots in British labour history”.

But as the history books are removed from storage, they pose new questions. In particular, which chapters will be read and how will they be interpreted? “Last week Liam Byrne quoted Herbert Morrison’s 1947 party conference speech,” says Rosen, “and used it very powerfully to expose the myth Labour has historically been soft on welfare cheats.” Another shadow cabinet source is even more blunt: “The main lesson some people seem to have learnt over the past 13 years is that it doesn’t really matter if Labour wins elections. That’s a problem.”

History may be written by the victors, but try telling that to the vanquished.

Dan Hodges is a Labour commentator 

Tags: Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown, Issue 42, Jon Cruddas, Labour Party, Tony Blair