THERE ARE a series of important elections across the country scheduled for May. It is important to state at the outset that everyone should vote Labour, as I have always done. Whatever disagreement we may have within the Labour Party and they are often very serious, any Labour candidate is a better option than any Tory or Lib Dem.

But enthusiasm and exhortation alone are not enough to win elections, otherwise Labour would trounce the Tories every time. You also need strategy and you need the tactics that flow from that. Perhaps one of the most appropriate, but least expected places to look for strategic guidance is the Blair leadership.

Naturally, I do not mean Blair or Mandelson, who offer only a distortion of what they themselves did. But we need to examine both the successes and failures of the Blair period to genuinely learn from it.

After all, Labour prime ministers are not that plentiful. More people (and I am sorry to say, they are all men in both cases) have been to the moon than have been elected as a Labour prime minister. In my lifetime, I have only seen two. I was born after the Attlee government lost in 1951, so the only two elected Labour prime ministers in my lifetime are Harold Wilson and Tony Blair.

We can and should learn a lot from the Wilson governments, both positive and negative. But for now it is useful to concentrate on the more recent Labour election winner, Tony Blair. His history too should be examined from the perspective of what should be emulated — and what should not.

It is necessary first to deal with the Blairite distortion of their own history. This is important, because operating under a false set of assumptions is the surest road to defeat. And we already know it is difficult enough.

The Blairites offer these false claims: that elections are won in the centre, that pensioners’ votes are more important than young people’s votes, that you must engage your opponents on their chosen terrain, you must target Tory voters and so on.

None of it is true. In 2017 Jeremy Corbyn had the biggest swing to Labour in the modern era by doing the opposite of all that and came within a few thousand votes of winning. And the Labour leaders who did follow these Third Way prescriptions experienced disastrous outcomes — and so did the population.

Instead, to understand Blairism it is necessary to examine the situation objectively.

The first is that the Tories were there for the taking. By the election in 1997 they had been in office for 18 years. They had squandered the proceeds of the North Sea oil in the Lawson boom, which soon turned to bust. They had lost any reputation for economic competence with the debacle around the Exchange Rate Mechanism. They were mired in sleaze and corruption. The “glory” of the Falklands War had long faded.

Some of this may sound familiar. Yet when Blair praised Thatcher, many of us thought this was completely objectionable and said so at the time. But I do not recall him ever praising his actual opponent, John Major. Nor do I ever recall him rubbishing his predecessor John Smith.

For ordinary voters, these signals matter. If you don’t think and say your party is better than the Tories, why should they? If the Tories are reviled, show you oppose them.

From that basic positioning, Blair’s greatest electoral achievement was to build a successful coalition that delivered a landslide victory.

That coalition is worth examining, because it is in rebuilding it that the possibility of electoral victory lies. But there is an awful lot of rubbish talked about class in this country, some of it from people who really ought to know better.

Class is not about schools, accents, regions, which newspapers you read, or any other such nonsense. It is about your job and what your income is. If you mainly live by working, you are a worker. That’s it. All the rubbish talked about A, B, C1, C2, D and E voters is just that — garbage.

I have even heard colleagues bemoan the fact that we attract B-category voters. The largest occupational addition to that group over the last few decades has been the recategorisation of nurses into the B group. If anyone in Labour says we do not want the nurses’ vote, they are an idiot.

What Blair achieved and what needs to be emulated is the ability to construct a coalition of workers in general, both lower and higher skilled and lower and higher paid (nurses fall into an unusual but growing category of high skilled and low paid).

The truth is, the overwhelming majority of the electorate in this country are workers and it is Labour’s serial failure to draw all types of workers to it that he led to many more defeats than victories.

That broad appeal must be on the basis of self-interest. It is both a moral duty and a political reality that you cannot win by promising to make some people worse off. All efforts to hit higher-paid workers to redirect incomes to lower-paid workers are doomed to failure. Policies such as a penny on income taxes to pay for benefits have never won elections. By the same token, it is morally repugnant and politically useless to promise the reverse, cutting welfare benefits to pay for higher-rate tax cuts.

Similarly, being “tough on immigration” alienates black and Asian voters and anti-racists — and the Tories will always outdo Labour on dog-whistle politics.

Successful coalition building is expressed in slogans around policies. The offer to prioritise “education, education, education” is hugely popular to workers who want a better future for themselves and their loved ones. Similarly, “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” says to workers (who are the main victims of crime), we will protect you and we will address society’s ills which cause crime.

But much of this seems to have been forgotten, or never understood. When it is said now that “we will be tough on crime” the second key part of the message, tough on the causes of crime, is entirely missing. And certainly, neither Tony Blair nor anyone in the New Labour leadership ever said, “We should shoot terrorists first and ask questions later.”

The same is true of talk about naming and shaming drug users, rather than treating drug use as a public health issue. We seem to have no equivalent to the promise on education.

Worst of all, repeating that you support Boris Johnson is chaining yourself to a drowning man. The only way he can escape is if you rescue him.

Of course, some might object to all this that Blair implemented Tory spending plans in the first two years and then drove us into the disastrous Iraq War and overall lost four and a half million votes in his time in office, which ended in ignominy. All this is true; there is no attempt here to falsify the record on Blairism. That cottage industry already exists.

The argument is that there is no mileage in adopting this falsified picture as the road to victory. It is not.

Instead, we should learn from the most genuinely effective aspects of New Labour and put forward a balanced message. Otherwise, the danger is that the current Labour Party ends up in a position to the right of Tony Blair.

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.