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How the Tory party reinvented itself as the party of power
Johnson’s team won the election by stealing some of Labour’s clothes and by focusing with relentless discipline on Labour’s Brexit-shaped vulnerability, says NICK WRIGHT

THE battle for Labour’s political identity is shaping up as a contest between malign myth and rational enquiry; between the dead weight of a dying tradition and the adult stirrings of a new sense of collective values; between the zombie politics of capitalist consensus and a new politics of class combativity.

It is taken as the common ground of Labour politics that New Labour’s corpse is dead and buried.

That, while a balanced accounting of the New Labour years will allow for the positive effects of some policies — particularly around early-years provision and NHS spending — the two key features of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s political project are history. 

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